Source: O Tempo, 14/10/2004

Found in retail stores in major cities, toys, CDs, clothing, DVDs, sneakers, software, glasses, cigarettes and a plethora of other counterfeit products cause wholesale damage to Brazil.

A study by the Brazil-US Business Council, released in Rio de Janeiro, estimates the loss of the Brazilian economy to piracy at US $ 20 billion per year.

According to the study, if there were no trade in illegal products, the country could generate 1,5 million jobs. In some cases, such as CDs and software, the parallel market is already bigger than the formal one, with slices of 52% and 61%, respectively.

In the case of CDs, the study highlights the speed with which the pirated product won over consumers. In 1997, only 5% of records sold in Brazil did not come out of record labels. As a result, the record industry has closed 55 jobs in the past three years and governments have stopped collecting $ 82 million in fees and taxes. Only Nike shoes are counterfeited no less than one million pairs a year in the country. In the case of software, pirated sales turn over US $ 520 million per year. In taxes, the loss reaches US $ 335 million.

Fake cigarettes also take over from licensed brands. Each year, 51 billion pirated units are sold, or 34% of the total sold in the country. The figures were shown by Dannemann Siemsen, an intellectual property office.

For the president of Instituto Etco - who advocates fair competition between companies - Emerson Kapaz, the high tax burden, coupled with bureaucracy to open and close a company and the slowness of the judiciary, which gives the contraventant the belief in impunity, make the proper environment to proliferate illegal trade.