So, as an example of the unfortunate reverse corollary, take Singapore. Singapore has very strong IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) protection, and police and customs agencies work in close concert and pro-actively to go after any counterfeit product coming into the market. They fully honor Madrid protocols and will actively seek out IP owners to determine if suspect product is legit or not. Any costs to the licensor to defend its IP is minimal. Also, as a consequence, relatively speaking there is very little counterfeit product in Singapore.
Contrast that with many of the other markets in Southeast Asia and the situation is pretty much diametrically opposite. Enforcement authorities are not pro-active and often even expecting pay offs of some sort to get involved in helping a licensor, or are otherwise already on the take with the counterfeiters, you often need to hold the actual trademark (or at least the application for same) in the material class before you can take any legal action, and the legal process itself is opaque and costly. Finally, your results are by no means guaranteed. As such, it naturally follows that these are precisely the markets where piracy flourishes.
This may seem like an overly bleak picture of things, but having worked in this part of the world for the last 20 years, I can say it is both manageable, and decreasing overall as a problem, which was one of my opening points on the topic.
Almost done; more soon…..