FESI, the European Federation of the Sporting Goods Industry, said it welcomes the consumer-driven approach taken by the Internal Market Committee (IMCO) of the European Parliament in adopting a report on the future Digital Services Act (DSA) of the European Union, as it introduces an obligation to inform consumers when they have purchased an illegal product online.
“Currently, many consumers are being misled when they buy products online, especially sporting goods,” said Jérôme Pero, secretary general of FESI, in a press release. “And unfortunately, when they inadvertently purchase a counterfeit product, it is often the original brand that they blame for the poor quality of the item received,” he noted.
On the other hand, FESI said it was particularly worried about the inclusion of a waiver for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the IMCO report, drafted by Christel Schaldermose, a member of the European Parliament from Denmark. “By excluding SMEs from due diligence obligations, the Parliament’s report only encourages counterfeiters to migrate from large platforms to smaller ones to continue selling their illegal products,” said FESI.
As small brick-and-mortar retailers suffer the most from counterfeiting, excluding small online retailers would create confusion and legal uncertainty, as well as unfair inequalities in the market, FESI stressed, pointing out that physical SMEs “represent the core of the European economy.”
Furthermore, FESI said it regrets “the very limited scope of the know your business customer obligation enshrined in the DSA.” It argued that the obligation must be extended to all online intermediaries, well beyond the online marketplaces, in order to eradicate the supply of illegal content online. It referred to recent data showing that social media platforms represented over one-third of all detections of intellectual property abuse.
FESI also said it welcomes the inclusion of a “trusted flagger” status in the DSA, but warned that the current text of the provision may prevent the individual right holders, i.e. the sporting goods brands, to qualify for such a status. “Requiring trusted flaggers to ‘represent collective interests’ would end up in disqualifying individual brands from this status and thus prevent illegal items from being quickly removed from sale to consumers,” said Pero, encouraging the Parliament to follow the European Council’s position on this point.
FESI concluded that the members of the European Parliament should consider these recommendations, ahead of a final vote in January, if they want to make sure that “what is illegal offline is illegal online.”
