Yet nearly £4bn is lost every year by legitimate manufacturers to counterfeiters who are able to effectively steal their profits by palming off customers with poor copies, or intercepting and re-selling perfectly good original products.

The world economy may have crashed, but there is no recession in the counterfeiting business. Global manufacturing is under attack from highly resourceful fraudsters who can cream off millions in fake products – everything from artificial hips to chocolate.

With manufacturing increasingly located in the booming emerging economies of the Far East, India and South America counterfeiters are finding ever more sophisticated ways of flooding the markets with goods that are almost impossible to tell from the real thing.

Impossible that is until you try to use them. Print cartridges that should deliver 100 cycles will run out after only 20. The ink will leak and smudge. And one manufacturer I know of faces an annual loss of £10m - £12m as a result.

Figures from the Chartered Institute of Marketers show criminals made over £3bn from fake clothing and footwear in 2008 alone. And the audio visual industry, devastated by online pirating, lost £531 million in 2008.

Labelsco, part of MSO Group, is curently producing specially coded varnishes, invisible codes which can be detected on an i-phone camera and instantly checked online with a global database and breath-activated holograms - all in the armoury of manufacturers who need to protect their product.

One of the main aims of ACTA is to get the emerging manufacturing economies such as China, India and Brazil to sign up to anti-counterfeit measures. The unilateral agreement was first proposed in 2006.

This year the first draft was made public, and was immediately embroiled in criticism that by making counter-fraud measures public, it could threaten the commercial and security interests of these countries.

Counterfeiting is a commercial terrorism that does not play by specific rules. This makes it uniquely difficult to oppose. But while international diplomacy grinds exceedingly slow, it is being combatted by a tiny number of specialist companies – deliberately so, to ensure that the counterfeiters find it very difficult to replicate their methods.