IP & Brand Protection

Copyright protection services use bots to act as enforcement agents, ensuring website content is not in breach of any royalty licences and that they are not stealing copyrighted content or abusing trademarks. These automated tools can lead to legal cease and desist letters for potential brand and trade mark infringement, which need to be responded to, and can therefore cause legal costs to be incurred to defend against the claims. They can also result in copyright claims if, for example a copyrighted image is used with the correct licence. It’s a complex are as image licences often vary by image according to the context of its usage. For example, a corporate brand may licence PR images for news and media distribution only - and not for use on commercial web sites. You can fall foul of these complex licence agreements by using popular images on the Internet without checking. VerifiedVisitors has identified 36 IP/ Brand protection bots currently actively crawling the internet. Although we do recommend discretion for these bots, we would strongly recommend you do an internal IP audit and ensure your content isn’t in breach of any brand compliance laws and regulations first. Larger companies with their own content libraries manage the process automatically, but smaller companies struggle with compliance. The widespread use of royalty free services such as Unsplash helps to alleviate the risk, but it’s only too easy to use a copyrighted image in a blog.