Brand Protection Services in India | Safeguard your Business

 

Brand protection should be regarded as a critical corporate task. Counterfeits have a huge long-term impact on brands. The main disadvantages for brands include sales losses, reputational damage, a lack of confidence between business partners, and resources spent fighting fakes. That is where brand protection services in India come to the rescue.

When it comes to the online world, things are a little different. Cybercriminals are more easily able to sell counterfeits online thanks to technical advancements. 

As a result, protecting businesses online becomes even more difficult, as infringers adopt cutting-edge evasion strategies like geo-adaption to avoid detection.

We'll go over the important measures to safeguard your brand in this article. Also, we will explain why registering your brand's intellectual property is vital and teach you how to legally protect your brand online.

 

What's the first thing you should do to protect your brand against imitators?

Before we get into the specific activities you may take to defend your brand, let's define counterfeit: Counterfeiters duplicate genuine brand products by replicating the design and name of the product without the permission of the intellectual property owner. 

Counterfeiters infringe on copyrights, trademarks, and patents by doing so. Registering your intellectual property is the most basic step in safeguarding your brand from counterfeiters. 

When detecting bogus products, you can use this method to prove and claim ownership of the IP. Consider registering the following intellectual properties as a brand owner:

 

3 Major Brand Protection Services in India

Copyright

The creator's original works are protected by copyright. It could be a literary work, music, art, software code, architecture, or something else. 

While concepts are not protected by copyright, the owner of a copyright has the sole right to sell, publish, and/or reproduce the protected work. 

Copyright protection does not require formal registration because authors' work is automatically protected. Registration is recommended if you wish to sell or start enforcing your copyright.

 

Patent

A patent restricts the third party from making, selling, or using an innovation without authorization. The patent owner has the right to commercialise his patent, which includes selling or licencing the innovation to a third party that has mutually agreed to do so. 

You can distinguish between design patents, which protect an item's decorative appearance, and utility patents, which protect an item's functional aspects. 

Patents, like copyrights, are only valid for a limited time. Patents in the European Union typically last 20 years.

 

Trademark

Trademarks are symbols, words, phrases, sounds, smells, or colour schemes that help customers to recognise and differentiate one company's goods and services from those of another. 

Trademarks include the Nike logo and the Apple logo. A trademark can cover a wide range of items or services, whereas a patent protects a specific idea.

You may start protecting your brand abroad by applying for trademark registration online in your own country. 

Because copyrights, patents, and trademarks are not internationally valid. Normally, it needs to be registered under national law in each country. 

The registration process and fees can vary greatly from one country to the next.

 

8 Legal Brand Protection Services Globally

 

1. Keep your website's content safe.

Many entrepreneurs are aware of the importance of trademarking their logo or brand name. Nevertheless, many entrepreneurs neglect the importance of protecting their website content. Creating a DMCA account is a straightforward way to do so. They are the world leader in copyright infringement takedowns under the DMCA. Display the badge on your website once it has been certified as a deterrent to content thieves.

 

2. Create a Google Alerts account.

It's a minor detail, but if you're not receiving updates on where your brand is mentioned, you won't know if there's a problem. We've had a problem with copyright infringement in particular, which we would have never seen if it hadn't been for Google Alerts.

 

3. Protect your intellectual property.

If you want to build a brand, you need to be sure you have the right intellectual property protections in place. Trademarks, copyrights, and patents are examples of IP protections. It's crucial to figure out which protections apply to your brand or firm. It is always a good idea to trademark a brand name if you are seeking to build one. It's a good idea to seek legal advice from an IP attorney.

 

4. Make an Identifiable Mark

A generic name will have less protection than a unique name (for example, a neologism like "Kodak" will have very strong protection, whereas "Film Maker" could not be eligible). If they are useless in context, common words may likewise be given strong protection (e.g., Apple for computers).

 

5. Create a handbook for employees

When meeting with a lawyer, there are numerous things you may do to help safeguard your business. You may purchase insurance, patent your invention, and register your name as a trademark. We recently decided to write an employee handbook. If a business has employees, you need to have a plan in place to safeguard your brand, and a handbook is a wonderful place to start for any startup.

 

6. Keep an eye on your brand and your competitors.

You can't defend something you don't know about, so make a plan to keep track of your own and your competitors' brands. Google Alerts and Twitter searches are two simple techniques that can help.

 

7. Establish legal divisions

Separate the many sections of your company with LLCs that are separate from one another. That way, your assets aren't all impacted at the same time. It's like having a tourniquet to keep your enterprises from negatively impacting one other.

 

8. Think globally rather than locally.

Obtaining trademark protection for your brand and corporation in the United States is a wonderful start, but you should also protect yourself in other countries. Even if international expansion isn't on your radar right now, it's a good idea to plan to ensure that you'll be able to expand in the future.

 

Conclusion

The competitive advantage of an internet business is based on and built around its ideas, and if these ideas are not effectively protected by trademark registration online and other Brand Protection Services in India, they can be stolen, resulting in significant financial losses for the company.