Anti-Counterfeiting Support Station

Greeting

Nowadays, commercial transactions are made in a global scale, and it is impossible to imagine life without imports from countries abroad. However, these imported products include many which infringe our intellectual property rights. The distribution of these infringing products within Japan not only causes damage towards the party possessing the right, but also may impede the development of our industries and cultures.
Once these infringing products are distributed in Japan, the crackdown of these products are difficult to conduct. Especially in recent years, counterfeit brand goods have been imported in small numbers, by ways such as importing via postal means, ordering through the Internet. This has caused and will keep causing the crackdown of the infringing products to be even more difficult.
One effective measure against this is import-export suspension. The import-export suspension is a system that suspends the infringing products at the customs, that is, before the products are actually distributed in Japan.
Here is a brief explanation about the import-export suspension system, taking an intellectual property infringing product as the main example.

	Head of the Anti-Counterfeiting S.S.	Patent and Trademark Attorney	Mana OISHI
	Head of the Tokyo Legal Division	Patent and Trademark Attorney	Kenjiro FUJITA