How can you protect your brand online?

Why should brands be concerned?

The double edged sword of the ecommerce boom

From fashion to adult
toys, cosmetics to outdoor apparel; the incredible growth of ecommerce has
meant that online retailers and shops are now able to engage with a much wider
audience, bringing about the potential for far greater profits. The shift in consumer
behavior from the more traditional way of shopping on the high street to buying
products online has led to an explosion in the ecommerce industry.

However, this boom in
online shopping has also been met with a huge influx of counterfeit versions of
goods, appearing online in ever more sophisticated and at times hard-to-detect
product listings across a wide variety of channels and online retail giants. Between 2008 and 2013, the European Union
Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) showed an 80 percent growth in global
counterfeiting, and this trend is unlikely to stop any time soon

While it’s difficult
to measure the exact size of the counterfeit industry, the International
Chamber of commerce estimates that the total value of international trade in counterfeit
goods may reach record levels of $991 billion by 2022, which is almost double
the size it was in 2015. Some of the main industries affected include footwear,
clothing, leather goods, watches, perfume and toys. Alibaba, Aliexpress and Amazon are frequently used by counterfeiters,
where they can sell their products alongside real versions at a lower price, as
opposed to selling them to dealers in bulk quantities. It is these
smaller-scale purchases shipped directly to customers which make it harder for
online retailers to monitor and harder for them to enforce penalties on
infringing vendors.

Social media and brandjacking

Another
growing concern is the number of fake products found on social media. Consumer Electronics Net reports on a study conducted by
online brand protection firm, Red Points, which looked into the number of
counterfeit soccer jerseys sold on social media channels such as Facebook and
Instagram. According to this research, the number of counterfeit shirts
detected on Facebook had reached 45% by 2017, while in 2015 this number was
just 2.2%.  

Brand
Quarterly, an online trade magazine for brand owners, highlights the scale and
implications of “brandjacking”; where fake goods imposters can impersonate a
brand by leveraging content and imagery, keyword manipulation, fake URLs and
other techniques which deter traffic away from the genuine brand. All of this
ultimately leads to lost revenue, a damaged brand reputation, and innumerably
more consequences facing underprepared brands.

This diverse range of
tricks adopted by counterfeiters to sell their products complicates the problem
further and has rendered time-consuming, manual detection methods and costly
legal services inferior in comparison to online brand protection methods. Such
methods use machine learning and image recognition technology to detect
intellectual property (IP) infringements within hours of them appearing on an
online marketplace.   

What steps can IP owners take to protect their assets online?

Legally register your intellectual property

In
order to protect your patent, design or trademark and be able to enforce a
legal obligation for a counterfeit to be removed online, it’s essential that
you first register your IP. It’s also recommendable for you to speak with an
intellectual property legal expert for you to find out the trademark needs of
your enterprise. Rights holders in
America can register their IP with the United States Patent and Trademark
Office or the US Copyright Office. Those who want to register intellectual property in Europe can
find a full and detailed explanation on the European Union Intellectual
Property Office’s (EUIPO) website. You can also find a full list of
national level authorities on the WIPO
Directory of Intellectual Property Offices.

Register your intellectual property with
ecommerce platforms
In recent years, large-scale ecommerce platforms
such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba have experienced many problems with
counterfeit goods being sold to consumers; this has forced both Amazon and eBay
to act accordingly and tackle the issue. Amazon created Amazon Brand Registry
and eBay rolled out VeRO. On these platforms,
brand owners can register their intellectual property and then use this as
proof of ownership to request the removal of counterfeit versions of their
brands. Alibaba also set up the Alibaba Anti-Counterfeiting Alliance to allow big companies to be able to collaborate and
combat together against IP infringement.

Purchase variations of your domain name

Cybersquatting is a
common way for IP infringers to hijack both brands and traffic volume form
authentic companies. Cybersquatters will purchase variations of a brands’
domain name in an attempt to appear legitimate. One way to pre-empt
cybersquatting is to beat the infringers to it and buy variations before they
do. Consider:

punctuation differences (e.g.
consumer-electronics-net.com)spelling errors (e.g.
cconsumerelectronicsnet.com)extension differences (e.g.
consumerelectronicsnet.co.uk)typing errors (e.g.
comsumerelectronicsnet.com)and generic differences (e.g. theconsumerelectronicsnet.com)

Online brand protection software

The explosion in ecommerce
has also seen a number of online brand protection companies sprout up in order
for them to fight against the problems brands are faced with online. Brand
protection software is able to scan the internet using targeted keywords and image
recognition to identify fake versions of products and other related intellectual
property infringements. This combination requires little human interaction and
allows brands to make time- and cost- saving measures.