News New report on counterfeit goods is published Fancy-dress clothes burn up in seconds An investigation by consumer programme Watchdog has revealed that some childrens fancy-dress clothes burn and melt in just 20 seconds. The BBC programme carried out the investigation in May, after television broadcaster Claudia Winkleman spoke of her horror at witnessing her eight-year-old daughter Matilda being engulfed by ames while trick-or-treating last Halloween. Winkleman told the shows Chris Hollins that when Matildas oaty witch outt touched a tea light inside a pumpkin, her daughter was engulfed by ames in seconds. Speaking of the moment it happened, Winkleman said: There were a lot of kids there, they were having sweets and I was talking to somebody, and then I just heard her scream. And she just screamed Mummy! I turned round and that was that, she was just on re. I mean she was on re. It feels like she was on re for hours, but the surgeon said that denitely wasnt the case and that it was probably just seconds, but she went up its the only way I know how to describe it. Its not like re I had seen before. It took two people to battle the ames, which Winkleman said kept coming up in front of our eyes; it was like those horric birthday candles that you blow out and they come back. We couldnt put her out. It was the tights, they came back to life. According to Winkleman, Matildas clothes were melting and her tights had melded into her skin. Winkleman added: Thank God Jamie [another parent] was there because otherwise they [the children] would have all [gone up]. Everyone was in a starchy felt, crackly costume. Jamie said: I thought everyones gonna go. Matildas surgeon described the re not as a burn, but as an attack because of the violence of it. Matilda suffered a large amount of thirddegree burns and has since had several operations. According to Watchdog, these types of dressing-up outts are sold legally in the UK and across Europe because they are classed as toys, and so pass all the safety tests. This means they can carry the CE mark supposedly the mark of safety. The fancy-dress clothes are tested under ammability test EN71 if a fabric burns quicker than 3cm per second, it fails but this test was designed for toys, not clothing. Nightwear, which falls under a different classication, passes its ammability test by burning three times slower, so if it smoulders, theres a chance of removing the item of clothing. Watchdog is now calling for fancy-dress clothing to be reclassied to this same standard something that, if it was achieved, says Winkleman, would be an enormous result. Watchdogs ndings have been sent to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the programme has asked the department and all major shops that stock these items to respond. Counterfeit products made within the EU are on the rise, according to the first joint situation report on counterfeit goods by a number of European agencies. The report by Europol and the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) released through the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights found that counterfeiting in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the UK are rising. More than two-thirds of counterfeit goods come from China. However, according to the 2015 Situation Report on Counterfeiting in the European Union, large-scale domestic production of counterfeit goods in the EU is becoming an increasingly profitable business for organised crime groups and organisations. Counterfeiters, who operate with significantly lower risks, have been found to have links with other forms of crime, such as human trafficking notably for labour exploitation as well as with other criminal groups, originating from countries in and outside Europe. The most significant enabler for distributing these counterfeit goods is the internet. Consumers are drawn to e-commerce sites because of their prices, 24/7 availability and direct delivery. Some websites are of such high quality that they rival those of the rights holder. Counterfeiters are able to function across multiple jurisdictions, evading capture, and are able to take down and set up new websites overnight, without losing their customer base. Antnio Campinos, OHIM president, said: A more structured and systematic intelligence effort on the criminal dimension of counterfeiting is seriously needed, and would benefit national operational initiatives. OHIM is determined to strengthen its cooperation with Europol by supporting information gathering, especially in the online environment, and by providing easy and secure access to IT tools aimed at facilitating exchange of information between rights holders and enforcement authorities. PIPCU announces more than 10 million website diversions The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) marked World Intellectual Property Day 2015 in April by announcing that it has diverted more than 10.3 million illegal music and lm sites to an ofcial police warning page since July last year. Launched in September 2013, the team has been tackling copyrightinfringing sites in the UK and across the world ever since, to help protect the creative industries, including lm and music. Many of the illegal websites targeted by the unit are then diverted to a PIPCU domain suspension page. This is an ofcial message from the City of London Police, warning the user that the website they are trying to access is currently under investigation by PIPCU, the only specialist police unit in the world dedicated to tackling online intellectual property crime. The page also includes signposts to safe and reliable websites that provide legitimate access to music, lms and books, as well as a link to the PIPCU website. The campaign theme for World IP Day this year was: Get up, Stand Up. For Music.