Turkey has a special global geographical location, at a
crossroads of the flow of goods between Europe and Asia. This puts Turkey in a
critical position regarding counterfeited goods traffic within the European
Union (EU) internal market and the external markets, to where fake goods
produced in Turkey are exported.
The counterfeit market in Turkey is huge, although recently the police and
customs authorities have worked together to prevent sales of counterfeits. There
have also been various programmes to raise public awareness of counterfeits.
To effectively tackle the production and sale of counterfeited goods, Turkey
amended its customs rules covering intellectual and industrial rights in 2009
and 2010 to comply with those in the EU.
Turkish customs authorities have simplifield destruction systems, extended
customs applications from one month to 12 months and created centralised customs
application systems for IP protection at Turkish customs, replacing the practice
of filing customs applications at each customs authority separately. Turkish
customs authorities have also arranged a number of training programmes for
customs officials and controllers, and developed their so-ware capability to
monitor customs applications more effciently.
Despite these attempts, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global
Competitiveness Report (2011–2012), Turkey is still ranked in 86 out of 144
countries in terms of the quality of IP protection.
You can still see fake and imitated goods in daily life, which is mostly because
of low purchase power, insufficient awareness about customer rights and lack of
enforcement of the laws in due course, etc. These factors make Turkey a country
in which IP owners need to protect their rights.
Considering the intercontinental location of Turkey, customs applications are an
effective tool used by the customs authorities to protect IP.