Tuesday, 11 June 2019

How to protect your IP online

From grey market resellers who undercut brands’ own prices on marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, to businesses that misuse copyrighted content, online intellectual property infringement is rife. Experts share ways to protect your IP.

 

Guarding against IP infringements

There are several steps SMEs can take to ward off intellectual property (IP) infringements and to avoid committing such offenses against others. “The most underrated protection is the ‘©’ symbol,” says Joanne Frears, a solicitor at law firm Lionshead Law. “It’s very easy to use, and it reminds people you consider your work valuable and your own. Unlike the ‘®’ symbol, you don’t have to register a trademark to use it. It’s really underused.”

 

Frears uses Google Alerts, a free service that delivers automated notifications when specified keywords are used in content on the indexed web, to spot infringements against her clients. “You set one up saying you want to know when your name or content is being used,” she says. “This will help you see who’s talking about you and what they’re saying.”

 

Avoiding misuse of your competitors’ IP is another key concern for Frears and her clients. “I’ve come across businesses that will take an image from somewhere online because they have the misconception that everything on the web is free,” she says. “Then they get a letter from the copyright owner saying” ‘We want £600 for use of our stock image.’ It’s far better to pay for access to stock images or use images of your own.”

 

One of Frears’s clients, a retailer, ran into legal trouble after posting an image of a competitor’s product. “The competitor said they were really unhappy and thought the client had misdescribed the product by suggesting it was their own,” says Frears. “They were facing all sorts of claims – copyright, trademark, trading standards – and the board was then faced with a paralysis over which claim to deal with first.”

 

Another mistake Frears encounters is businesses copying legal terms from other companies. “Don’t take terms of business or a privacy policy from someone else’s website because those terms may not apply to your own business,” she says. “It’s worth spending a few hundred pounds on having your own terms and conditions written up, rather than spending several thousand pounds on lawyers’ fees at a later date.”

 

Make image use traceable

For freelance photographer Amy Heycock, taking steps to protect images from misuse by third parties is routine. At the outset of using or sharing an image online, Heycock adds keywords to the relevant image file using programs such as Adobe Lightroom. “It means adding descriptions of what the image is, so when it’s uploaded online or into a program, those words are attached,” says Heycock. “I add my name and a copyright symbol, and I describe parts of the image. This means you can see where your images go and control what comes up when people search for the image. You can then potentially find where your image has been used.”

 

Sharing images with clients is intrinsic to Heycock’s work as a freelance photographer, although how this is done affects the level of IP infringement risk. “I keep my photos on sharing websites where you can make everything private,” she says.

“You can then give the client a password and can see who has accessed the images in high resolution. I use the photo-sharing platform SmugMug, which gives you the IP addresses of whoever has downloaded your images, so you can see when something’s going on. If you still have the rights to the images, you can control who’s seeing what.”

 

Create a strategy

Businesses should claim as many online properties relating to their brand and trademarks as they can, says Steve Kuncewicz, partner at insurance risk and commercial law firm BLM Law. “We tell people to get their profiles registered on platforms like Facebook and buy website domain names containing the brand name and variants of it,” he says.

 

This approach can stop third parties misusing web domains and social media accounts relating to trademarked terms, and reduces the opportunity for ‘cybersquatters’ to claim such properties, with a view to selling them back to the brand at an exorbitant price.

 

When online IP infringements do occur, Kuncewicz says, the most efficient way to resolve the issue may be to deal with the online platform where the infringement is publicly visible, such as Facebook or Google. “The platforms are starting to wake up to their responsibility, and when they’re made aware of infringements they tend to take results down,” he says.

 

While many platforms are good at dealing with infringements, Kuncewicz says that the workload of reporting multiple cases is likely to intensify as a business grows.

 

BLM Law’s solution to this problem is to automate some of the steps involved in handling infringements, such as misuses of copyrighted images and sales of counterfeit goods. “For one of our clients, a cosmetics distributor, we managed to get a fair amount of control on infringements using a bespoke system, aligned with the process for reporting to eBay,” he says.

“We had data on the nature of infringements against our client, and that meant we were able to segment infringers by type, make specimen letters to send to eBay, and set up a spreadsheet-based reporting system.”

 

For smaller businesses experiencing IP infringement relatively rarely, Kuncewicz advises studying the online marketplaces where infringements are happening and getting used to how they handle reporting. “Get protection where [you] can, register trademarks on your branding, and most importantly, keep all your information trails so you can take action when you need to,” he says.

“If your brand is successful, people are going to want to misuse it. The more you accept that, and the more you treat it as part of your business, the more successful you will be in protecting your intellectual property.”

 

Know your rights: five steps to take

1. Online IP rights vary among territories, which can make enforcement difficult. This can mean the best way to protect IP is to report infringements to platforms like Google and eBay.
2. The authority responsible for IP rights in the UK is the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), which is under the umbrella of the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO), an agency of the United Nations.
3. Using the © symbol with your IP is a good way to discourage infringements. Unlike the ® symbol, it does not require the registration of a trademark.
4. Contrary to popular belief, posting photos and videos on Facebook, Instagram and social media does not grant ownership of the IP to the platform. However, it may grant usage rights.
5. It’s advisable to have a lawyer write up unique terms and conditions for your business’ website. Terms lifted from other companies’ websites may not relate properly to your business.