It is not too late to register to attend the EU Blockathon being held in Brussels on 22 and 25 June 2018. MARQUES is pleased to be supporting this event, along with some of its corporate and expert members. More information is available on the EU Blockathon website.

The Blockathon is organised by the EUIPO in cooperation with the European Commission and will be attended by Vice President Ansip.

The Observatory has recently announced that a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will be signed during the closing of the Blockathon on 25 June. Here are more details about the MoU, as announced by the European Commission:

Background

Online advertising is a major source of income for IPR infringing sites, and efforts to reduce the flow of ad revenue to such sites have been underway at national level in a number of countries for some time. The world of online advertising is a hugely complex one that is governed by algorithms, real time bidding, ad impressions, performance display ad allocation, and an array of other perplexing factors. In this complex environment, ad misplacement continues to be an issue, with the brands themselves often unaware of where their ads are ending up. This is an important problem not just for the advertising brands, but very importantly, for consumers, since the presence of ads for household brands and well known payment services on IPR infringing sites will often lead the consumers to believe that the site they are accessing is legal when it is not.

Memorandum of Understanding on online advertising and IPR

The European Commission has launched a stakeholders’ dialogue to encourage the industry representatives to agree on commitments that would help to address this problem. After agreeing on Guiding Principles the interested stakeholders participated in a series of meetings with an objective to prepare a text of a Memorandum of Understanding on online advertising and IPR (‘MoU’). The objective of this MoU is to:

• minimise the placement of advertising on websites and mobile applications that infringe copyright or that disseminate counterfeit goods, on a commercial scale, and thus
• minimise the revenue that such websites or mobile applications gain from online advertising.

To attend the Blockathon, please register online here.