Customs action against infringing goods: what to do in the first ten days comes down to one fast decision: confirm standing, choose the simplified or destruction procedure, and reply before customs' response window closes. Acting inside that window keeps the case in the customs procedure, cheaper and faster than court; missing it pushes matters back to ordinary infringement proceedings.
Who this concerns
This situation reaches trademark, patent and design owners whose goods, or goods that infringe their rights, pass through a Swedish port, airport or postal hub. It also reaches importers and distributors who receive a notice that a shipment has been stopped and who need to decide whether to contest it. The trigger is usually one of two events: customs flags a consignment against a registered application for action already on file with the intellectual property and UPC team advising the rights holder, or customs acts on its own initiative and only afterwards looks for the rights holder to confirm.
Either way, the clock starts when the notification arrives, not when someone reads it. A brand owner who checks a mailbox once a week and a licensee who monitors shipments daily are in the same legal situation but very different practical ones.
The pattern turns up most often in fashion, consumer electronics, spare parts and pharmaceuticals, but the mechanism itself does not care about the industry. It cares about whether a right is registered, whether the goods match what was registered, and whether someone with standing responds inside the window.
What the law says
The mechanism customs relies on sits at EU level and is applied by the Swedish customs authority at the border. Under Swedish law as it currently stands, the authority can detain suspected infringing goods either because a rights holder has a live application for action registered, or, in narrower circumstances, on its own initiative before any application exists. Detention is not a finding of infringement. It is a hold that creates a window for the rights holder to act, and for the declarant or holder of the goods to object.
If nobody objects within the response period, the goods can generally be destroyed under a simplified procedure without a separate court judgment on infringement. If the declarant or holder objects, the matter has to be resolved through ordinary infringement proceedings, and the customs hold does not by itself decide anything.
The distinction between the two routes into detention matters in practice. An application-based detention means the rights holder was already known to customs and the notice usually arrives quickly and with more detail. An ex officio detention means customs acted first and is now looking for confirmation, which slows the whole sequence down at the exact moment speed matters most.
Where the rights holder, the manufacturer of the genuine goods, or the parent company sits outside Sweden, the practical mechanics change. An application for action registered only nationally will not catch a shipment moving through a different member state's border post; a rights holder relying purely on national registration needs to check whether the same protection extends across the EU or has to be renewed country by country. Instructions, powers of attorney and evidence of ownership also take longer to assemble when the decision maker is not in the same time zone as the response window.
How it works in practice
Day one: reading the notification correctly
The notice from customs states what was detained, where, in what quantity, and which right it is said to infringe. It rarely states with certainty that infringement has occurred; it states that customs suspects it and needs the rights holder's position. Misreading this as a finding of infringement, or as a formality that can wait, is the single most common error at this stage.
Confirming standing before doing anything else
Before responding, confirm that the entity receiving the notice is the correct rights holder, or holds a valid licence with standing to act, for the specific right listed. A group structure where the registered owner and the operating company are different entities is a frequent source of delay here, and the delay eats directly into the response window.
Choosing between the simplified procedure and infringement proceedings
If the goods are counterfeit beyond reasonable dispute and the position is uncontested, the simplified procedure leading to destruction is usually the faster and cheaper route. If the declarant or holder raises a serious objection, for example a parallel import argument or a claim that the goods are genuine, the case moves outside the customs mechanism and into ordinary proceedings, where the customs hold is only one piece of evidence.
What the importer or declarant can do to slow things down
An objection does not need to be strong to buy time. It only needs to be filed within the deadline set out in the notice. Rights holders who assume that an objection will be dismissed on the papers are often surprised by how much further evidence gathering a genuine objection forces.
Building the evidence file inside the window
The file that supports either destruction or later court proceedings needs to be assembled while the goods are still detained: photographs from the inspection, comparison against registered marks or designs, any prior detentions of the same consignor, and a clear chain establishing that the applicant is the correct rights holder. Assembling this after the goods are released is far harder, and sometimes impossible.
Notifying licensees and downstream buyers
Where a licensee sells under the mark, or a distributor has already committed stock to a customer, that party often needs to be told before the position is finalised, not after. A destruction decision taken without checking downstream commitments creates a second dispute layered on top of the customs case.
What this costs and what drives it up
The cost of a customs action is not fixed. It is driven by the volume of goods detained, whether storage and destruction costs fall on the rights holder or are recoverable from the declarant, and whether the matter stays inside the customs procedure or spills into infringement proceedings. A single detained pallet resolved through the simplified procedure costs a fraction of a contested case that reaches court.
What to check before day ten
- Whether the entity named on the notice matches the registered rights holder exactly
- Whether the application for action on file covers the specific right and the specific member state where detention occurred
- Whether the deadline in the notice is calculated in working days or calendar days for this particular notification
- Whether any prior detentions of the same consignor or importer exist and should be referenced
- Whether destruction, rather than release back to the declarant, is actually the outcome sought
- Whether storage costs are accruing and who is liable for them if the matter is contested
- Whether any licensee or downstream buyer needs to be told before a final decision is taken
What happens if the importer or holder objects to the detention?
An objection filed within the deadline moves the matter out of the simplified procedure and into ordinary infringement proceedings. The rights holder then needs to bring or defend a case on the merits within the separate time limit that applies to that route, and the customs detention itself stops being decisive on its own. The practical effect is a longer, more expensive process than destruction under the simplified procedure would have delivered, and one that now runs on a court timetable rather than a customs one.
Who pays for storage and destruction of the detained goods?
This depends on the procedure invoked and on what the notice itself states, and it is not the same in every case. In many simplified-procedure cases the rights holder is expected to cover storage and destruction costs in the first instance, with a right to seek recovery from the declarant or holder separately afterwards. Confirming this position before consenting to destruction avoids an unwelcome invoice arriving once the goods are already gone and there is nothing left to negotiate over.
Can customs detain goods without a registered application for action?
Yes, in narrower circumstances customs can act on its own initiative if goods are suspected of infringing an intellectual property right, without a prior application already on file. The rights holder is then asked to confirm the position and, usually, to file an application for action quickly if ongoing protection is wanted, since an ex officio detention on its own does not create a standing arrangement that covers future shipments from the same source.
The numbers
The figure that matters most is the length of the response window stated in the specific notice received, because it is what actually starts running, not a generic assumption carried over from a previous case or a different member state. Storage costs accrue for as long as the goods sit with customs, and they grow with volume and with how long any objection takes to resolve.
Whether a bond or security is required, and how large it needs to be, depends on the procedure invoked and on the value and nature of the goods, and should be checked against the notice and the procedure chosen rather than estimated from experience elsewhere. The threshold at which a contested matter becomes worth taking to court, rather than absorbing the cost of losing the shipment, also varies by case and by the commercial value of the right at stake.
None of these figures are the same across cases, and treating a deadline, a bond figure or a cost estimate from an earlier matter as applicable here is one of the fastest ways to lose the window that is actually running.
Where it usually goes wrong
The mechanism assumes the goods are destined for the Swedish or EU market. Goods genuinely in transit to a third country, with no intention of entering free circulation in the EU, sit in a different category, and the standard route to destruction does not apply to them in the same way. Small quantities that fall within a personal-use exemption are treated differently from a commercial consignment, even if the mark infringed is the same.
A rights holder without a valid application for action on file at the time of detention is in a weaker position than one who filed in advance, because reliance then falls on the narrower ex officio powers rather than on a standing arrangement. Parallel imports of genuine goods, relabelled or repackaged but not counterfeit, are frequently caught in the same net as counterfeit goods and require a different, more careful response; treating them the same as counterfeit stock is a common and costly mistake.
Repeat consignors create a different trap. A rights holder who treats each detention as an isolated event, rather than checking whether the same importer or forwarder has been flagged before, loses the chance to build a pattern that strengthens both the ex officio case and any later infringement proceedings.
Where the manufacturer, the registered rights holder or the parent company sits outside Sweden, the practical bottleneck is rarely the law itself. It is the time it takes to get a signed instruction, a power of attorney or confirmation of ownership from a decision maker abroad, inside a window measured in working days. Building that authorisation chain before goods are ever detained, rather than after, is the difference between a case handled inside the window and one that is not.
What to do next
The first ten days are for confirming standing, reading the notice correctly and deciding, on the facts as detained, whether destruction or a contested route is the right call. That is work a rights holder or its in-house counsel can usually start alone. It stops being self-directed work once an objection is filed, once the goods turn out to be parallel imports rather than counterfeits, or once the value at stake makes a wrong call expensive. That is the point to arrange an assessment call rather than guess.
A related first-ten-day situation worth knowing about is how employee invention compensation disputes get assessed early, since the same discipline, act inside the window or lose the leverage, applies there as well.