LATEST INSIGHTS

  • LEGAL UPDATE

€90 million in counterfeit food and drink seized: a wake-up call for IP and public health in the EU

A new report from the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), released in June 2025, has laid bare the growing scale and sophistication of food and drink counterfeiting across Europe. The coordinated effort, carried out by Europol and Interpol, resulted in the seizure of over €90 million worth of counterfeit food and beverages in 2024. This included 22,000 tonnes of fake food and more than 850,000 litres of alcoholic drinks.

  • AI & IP

Should AI developers be free to train their models on existing copyright works? The UK government is no longer so sure.

The “training” of AI models generally requires the ingestion of large quantities of data in the form of existing musical, literary, graphic or other works.  If these works are protected by copyright, then their reproduction as a result of this process will, if unlicensed by the copyright owners, be an infringement of that copyright, at least in the UK.