A new property fight

by Eric J. Sinrod

June 27, 2001 —

Intellectual property is often the crown jewel of a company. Yet that jewel can be misappropriated more easily than ever in the Internet age. And domain names, which can serve as both Web addresses and brandnames, are a form of intellectual property that's especially hot these days, according to a recent survey by Net Searchers International, a domain name registrar that also sells products and services designed to help manage domain names.

Of 4,000 intellectual property specialists in the U.S. and Europe who were surveyed, 90 percent said they have experienced domain name infringement and are reporting increases in other types of online abuse.

The report says that copyright infringement involving appropriation of material by Web sites such as Napster has risen 105 percent during the past three years and counterfeiting of intellectual property such as popular brand names has increased an astounding 1,650 percent.

As a result, 74 percent of survey respondents said they're "concerned" or "very concerned" about online infringement. Furthermore, 88 percent of respondents now spend more than 10 hours a week dealing with Internet intellectual property issues, and they expect to become even more involved with online brand protection.

And with new top-level domains such as .biz and .info coming down the pike, problems will likely be compounded as people vie to register names in these new domains that might infringe on the trademarks of others.

You plainly need to vigilantly protect your intellectual property. First, conduct legal audits to determine the true intellectual property that actually resides within your company. Then, take proactive steps to search for infringing activities and to ferret out infringing material. In the global economy, it's not enough to simply ascertain whether infringement is taking place close to home. You should launch both national and international searches for intellectual property infringement.

If you discover infringement, and negotiation doesn't cause the infringer to back down, you should initiate the necessary evil of legal action.

Yes, litigation is burdensome and costly. But if a company doesn't protect its intellectual property assets, it may be deemed to have forfeited any proprietary claim it has to its crown jewel.

Computerworld