Digital channels are used by businesses to increase brand awareness, market products and services, communicate with customers, and expedite purchases. Nonetheless, with identity imitation attacks on the ascent, organizations should guard their social and digital platforms by identifying, diagnosing, and remediating brand abuse events.
What is Brand Protection?
Brand protection, by definition, is the interaction by which organizations safeguard their protected innovation and related brands against forgers and the people who attempt to take them. Copyrights, licenses, and plans are instances of proprietary secrets.
Not only does brand protection defend against income loss, but it also protects the company’s reputation and image. In simple terms, brand protection is the process of preventing the brand from being abused or misused.
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Types of Brand Infringement
A brand can be infringed upon, misappropriated, or exploited in various ways. Let’s look at some of the most well-known types of trademark infringement.
1. Counterfeiting
A counterfeit product looks like an authentic brand’s product but is created informally by third parties. To fool customers, the fraudulent product will use the legitimate brand’s logos and trademarks without permission. Any brand, huge or small, strives to establish a public image. However, if counterfeiters target the brands, their reputation is at peril. As a result, potential buyers may ignore your brand in favor of others that seem more reliable, trustworthy, and high-quality.
2. Patent Theft
Patents are legal safeguards for new items that solve a problem in a novel way. External parties encroaching on patents will benefit from the effort and money involved in inventing the idea; therefore, inventors who have invented a new product are entitled to patent protection.
3. Copyright Piracy
A copyright is a legal protection given to artists, writers, and scientists who create works of art, literature, or science. Even if they aren’t creating art, novels, or scientific papers, businesses must preserve their copyright and have a robust brand protection strategy. Counterfeiters will take actual images of a product and use them to advertise and justify their illicit product listings on the internet.
4. Social media impersonation
Brand impersonation has increased dramatically in the last year, according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR 2021). Via online media, there has, as of late, been a ton of deception and encroachment of brand name and other licensed innovation data. Vicious people build fictitious social media accounts on various social media platforms and undertake various branding promotion campaigns in the name of the actual company.
5. Rogue Websites
Rogue or counterfeit websites, for example, are designed to look exactly like your brand’s legitimate website, frequently using a subtly altered version of your official URL. Other unauthorized websites do not always try to imitate the legitimate site’s look and feel. They appear to be counterfeit. However, the goal remains the same: to sell fake goods.
Types of Rogue Websites:
- Imitation sites are websites that are a carbon copy of a legitimate brand’s original website.
- Typo squatters are people that wait for internet users to type a website address incorrectly into their browser.
- Cybersquatters use other brands’ trademarks to claim legitimate website domains.
6. Identity Theft
Identity theft is the point at which somebody utilizes someone else’s name, email address or record data to gain admittance to a site, application, or other web-based help without their authorization. It’s one thing to secure oneself from hackers and data thieves, but it’s quite another if unauthorized individuals obtain access to a company’s personal accounts. As hackers try to impersonate organizations and send spam emails with malicious links or viruses, this helps safeguard firms from identity theft.
7. Design Theft
In most cases, design theft products are made to look like other firms’ products by duplicating their distinguishing features. This is done without using any protected trademarks, which would make the product a fake. If the copied brand’s products have protected designs, these items are usually prohibited. They are designed to resemble a current product in terms of appearance and feel.
8. Trademark Infringement
A trademark is a term, symbol, or design that a corporation uses to identify and distinguish its goods or services from those of other companies. Trademark rules exist to ensure that customers do not become confused about the origin of goods or services. The unapproved (without authorization) utilization of another dealer’s recognizable proof imprint, logo, or brand name is known as trademark infringement.
Scammers can use a variety of tactics, as you can see. And manually detecting all of the fakes and frauds that could harm your business is nearly difficult. To safeguard their brands, several companies utilize web scraping.
What can you do for your brand identity protection?
Here are a few ways your company may safeguard its brand identification and beat the brand abuse:
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1. Detection
Web crawlers will be used by trademark protection companies to gather data from the internet. These spiders’ data will be evaluated to identify instances of brand abuse. These companies employ residential proxies to hide their activities from website trackers and security measures.
Proxies mask a computer’s IP address entirely, preventing other internet users from following or analyzing your web activities. You may buy a proxy on specialist marketplaces with a good reputation, so double-check your proxy providers before proceeding.
“If you want to fool the browser and servers in order to get the information you want in spite of the fact that your real IP is being blocked, you will need to change your IP address from time to time. For this, you will need a residential proxy network. A high-quality residential proxy network will make your web browsing more reliable, decrease the chances of you getting blacklisted by your target website, as well as improve your privacy, security, and safety.” – as explained in one of the recent articles published by of GeoSurf.
2. Validation
The trademark protection protocol’s second step ensures that all information on infringements is accurate. This measure is taken to ensure that legitimate firms that have been detected by the web scraper and crawler are not unfairly penalized for IP abuse.
3. Enforcement
Brand protection service providers can also aid your company in removing any legal IP infringement that they discover on the internet. The service will move against rogue sites assuming the scratched information uncovers that they are infringing on your brand’s IP by doing unlawful ways of behaving, for example, cybersquatting or imitating websites.
Cyber squatters exploit your brand IP by asserting space names that permit them to take advantage of your brand names. Impersonation web page designers, then again, will make a site that attempts to make itself look real.
4. Reporting
The service provider will give you actionable and valuable information to ensure that your brand’s intellectual property is protected. The service provider can also assist in creating channels that will increase the company’s brand protection awareness.
How can web scraping help you to protect your brand?
Businesses have sought to fight the problem in the past by focusing on individual unauthorized traders. This technique was time-consuming and costly, not to mention challenging to locate all infringers.
Web scraping, fortunately, is a more efficient alternative that combines highly advanced data extraction methods with digitalization to screen a brand’s web-based presence constantly. Web scraping has progressed to the point where it can now monitor specific items in addition to tracking the brand itself.
At first glance, web scraping might assist guard against trademark, and copyright infringement may appear contradictory, if not hilarious, given that web scraping is frequently labeled illegal since it allegedly violates a website’s copyright. This is due to the fact that both parties can utilize web scraping techniques.
People that infringe on your intellectual property rights generally do so by scraping your website for information. However, there is a game that two people can play.
You can employ the same web scraping tactics against them by having a bot cruise the web for you to detect any unauthorized usage of your intellectual property. This bot can crawl through search engines and scrape specified websites for you.
The scraped data is then analyzed to massive databases or taught artificial intelligence to see if there are any probable matches with your intellectual property. Possible misappropriations of your products and images can be recognized using text and image recognition tools.
As a result, a web scraper can assist you in detecting copyright infringement. Naturally, this is not a magic potion. To appropriately safeguard your brand, you must constantly check the internet for any new possible infractions or misuses. By constantly monitoring your company’s online presence, you can rest assured that no one will steal your intellectual data and get away with it.
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Final Words
Organizations can’t bear to leave their brand unprotected in modern times. Retail and fake monitoring is crucial for brand protection, and web scraping through proxy servers can go quite far in assisting you with building a vigorous brand protection system.
Your identity is reflected in your brand. Infringers will only harm you and your brand’s reputation. Brands can be used in a variety of ways, but they can also be used against them. Protecting your brand and everything associated with it will help you stand out in the industry’s top circles.
To summarize, web scraping is essential for brand protection. It streamlines the procedure so you can concentrate on building your business. You can secure your market position rather than running after counterfeiters.
The battle against infringers is never-ending. The internet is continually expanding, and new websites appear on a daily basis. Scraping the web makes it simple to keep track of the growing number of websites and social media profiles.
While the difficulties of web scraping for trademark protection may be a worry, technological advancements allow web scraping developers to improve their scrapers. They can ensure that their products are resistant to infringers’ attempts to stifle cybersecurity firms.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
