Allen Westerfield Addressed Issue of Counterfeiting

In his speech at Recycling Times’ Conference@2013: Preparing for Change, Allen Westerfield, President of Image Supplies Coalition (ISC), addressed Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Issues in the Imaging Supplies Industry.

Allen’s speech consisted of four parts—an overview of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), an introduction about the Imaging Supplies Coalition, a summary of the “Clone” issue and call upon industry people to action.

Allen emphasized on the importance of IPR and focused on the issue of counterfeiting. He pointed out that 5% to 7% of the world trade is counterfeit, valuing $600 billion. He noted virtually all categories of goods are counterfeited and all brands are at risk. For the growth of counterfeiting, Allen has concluded several driving factors as below: profitability, difficulty of detection, weak enforcement and penalties, internet commerce and a great market demand.

According to Allen, counterfeiting posts threats to economy, people’s health and safety. Also, what is worse, it has links to organized crime and terrorists. Therefore, all participating parties of government, brand owners, resellers and consumers suffer loss. Moreover, clones are also emerging as a threat to the industry and it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell manufactured cartridges from cloned ones.

Thereupon, Allen introduced his organization to the audiences. With the mission to protect members, customers from misrepresented products and services, ISC offers training & education, counterfeit product identification, best practices sharing, techniques for avoiding telemarketing and e-commerce fraud, promote laws and their enforcement, and work with law enforcement & government agencies.

In his conclusion, Allen claimed that there will be fierce competition in the market place but, there should be zero tolerance for counterfeit, pirated or patent infringing product. Thus, he showed the position of ISC and called on every industry participant to work on eliminating infringing products from the imaging supplies industry, educate resellers, consumers and government, cooperate with government enforcement agencies and enlist their support, and develop a respect for intellectual property and demand enforcement.