Archive for the ‘Brand Abuse’ Category
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Designers and trade experts have noticed a rise in the counterfeiting of non-luxury brands according to a recent article titled, “Economic Indicator: Even Cheaper Knockoffs." The article indicates that non-luxury and lesser targeted brands are being heavily counterfeited alongside Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton.
It should not come as a big ...
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Monday, August 23rd, 2010
BJ Fogg, Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, recently gave a keynote session at last week’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Francisco called "Hot Triggers: The Power to Change Behavior". Recognized for his studies between the relationship of persuasion and technology, Fogg focused the discussion around ...
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Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
File-hosting companies are the latest class of online service providers to successfully dodge copyright infringement claims. Like online marketplace and search engine providers, cyberlockers have also triumphed in lawsuits filed against them because they were protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor.
A recent example involved a lawsuit ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Piracy, copyright | No Comments »
Monday, August 9th, 2010
Google recently announced that starting September 14, 2010, it will begin to allow advertisers in most European countries to use competitors’ trademarks when bidding for online ads. This shift in European policy doesn’t come as a complete surprise as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) sided with Google in the ...
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Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
The abuse of well-known seal of approvals seems to be the latest ruse used by online fraudsters. Leveraging reputable names that existed long before anyone heard of the Internet is a blaring reminder that even trustworthy seals are not off limits to scammers. In fact, linking to reliable sources of ...
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Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Chanel’s warning to counterfeiters: "we are watching and we are taking action." That’s the literal message you will see when visiting around 40 websites that used to sell counterfeit goods (such as mychanelshop.com) that now redirect to the Chanel-owned website chanelreplica.com. These domains were transferred to Chanel as a result ...
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Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
According to a CNN article, in less than 24 hours following the September 2009 release of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Lost Symbol, pirated versions were discovered on file sharing sites, such as RapidShare and BitTorrent. Within days, the book had been illegally downloaded more than 100,000 times. As of ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Piracy | No Comments »
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Last week, ICANN’s Tina Dam appeared on CNN’s, “Qwest Means Business” discussing the importance of IDN ccTLDs.
When asked whether having non-Latin domain names might contribute to greater confusion, Tina Dam stated that she did not see any reason why non-native speakers would need to access websites in other languages. Of ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Domains, ICANN, Trademarks | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
In the past few months, a flurry of gift card scams leveraging such high-profile brands as Best Buy, Whole Foods and IKEA have emerged on Facebook. These scams often use the brand’s logo, website URL, or general “look and feel” on Facebook “fan” pages to give the impression that these ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Phishing, Social Media, Trademarks, malware | No Comments »
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
In a landmark judgment issued this past Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Google* is not liable for trademark infringement when an advertiser purchases a keyword based on a competitor’s trademark to trigger a search ad, so long as it removes infringing ads promptly when notified by ...
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