Study reveals scale of brand support for infringing websites

A new report from the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights has found that over 1,600 brands placed online advertisements on sites suspected of copyright infringement during a six-week study.

The research focused on sites that were popular in one or more of the 28 EU member states and offered a variety of suspected infringing copyrighted content. Considering those ads placed on potentially infringing sites, it found that:

• 1,581 unique name brands were identified through the ads (where the ads themselves did not include sufficient brand information to permit attribution, these were labelled as ‘generic brands’, which accounted for a further 38 – taking the total number of potential unique brands to over 1,600);
• the highest number of unique brands found to be advertising on a single website was 204; and
• the top 25 named brands by advertising volume accounted for over half (53%) of all named brand ads in the European Union.