In a joint study undertaken by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) over 29% of jobs between 2014-2016 within the European Union were made up of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) intensive industries.

Custom authorities made over 69,000 detentions in 2018, with 26.7million articles suspected of infringing on intellectual property rights and with a domestic retail value of 738 million. In Ireland over 19,000 articles were detained in this time period.