Brand protection solutions: which one solves which problem

What are the main kinds of brand protection solution?

Five: monitoring, enforcement, marketplace programs, legal measures and authentication. Each solves a different problem. A monitoring tool won't register your trademark, and a registered trademark won't find a single copy for you.

Which solution fits which problem?

Start from what you're seeing. Your photos on other listings call for a copyright notice. Your logo on goods you didn't make calls for a trademark complaint and the platform's brand program. Fake stores and lookalike domains each need a different route again.

• Your photos on someone else's listing. File a copyright notice through the platform's route. Copyright belongs to whoever took the photos (17 U.S.C. 201), so check you own them first.
• Your logo or name on goods you didn't make. File a trademark complaint, then enroll in the platform's brand program where it has one, so its own systems start catching repeats.
• The same seller back under a new name. Report by seller, not by listing, so the platform sees the pattern. Our guide to stopping repeat counterfeit sellers covers it.
• A fake store copying your site. Report the copied content to the site's host. Don't report it to the domain registrar, which can only suspend the whole domain.
• A domain that mimics your brand name. That's a domain dispute. Under ICANN's UDRP, abusive registrations such as cybersquatting go to an approved dispute provider. WIPO's fee for 1 to 5 domains before a single panelist is $1,500.
• Fakes arriving in bulk. Record your registered trademark with US Customs and Border Protection, at $190 per class (19 CFR 133.3).
• A factory making identical goods at scale. That's a case for a lawyer, and the remedies in court are far larger than anything a form can do.

What do monitoring tools do, and where do they stop?

Monitoring tools search marketplaces on a schedule and match listings to your products by image and text, grouping the likely copies by seller. The good ones save evidence when they find a listing. None can confirm a copy for you, and whether they file depends on the tool.

The step-by-step mechanics are in how brand protection software works. The buying question is who files. A managed service files under an agreement to act for you, while self-serve software prepares the notice and you send it. Our guide to brand protection services compares the four kinds of provider on exactly that.

Monitoring earns its cost when copies arrive faster than you can find them by hand. Before that point, a weekly search of your best sellers' names and photos does the same job for an hour or so of your time.

How do marketplace programs like Amazon Brand Registry help?

They give you the platform's own tools: automated blocking, guided reporting and, for trusted brands, direct removal. Amazon Brand Registry is free and needs a pending or registered trademark. The catch is scope. Each program protects you only on its own platform.

Amazon Brand Registry says its predictive protections monitor for counterfeits and remove suspected listings before a transaction takes place, and that accurate reports strengthen those protections over time. To enroll you need a logo that includes your brand name, permanently affixed to your products or packaging. Amazon also says the program helps brands that don't sell in its store.

Project Zero adds self-service removal at no cost: you search for counterfeits and take the listings down immediately. To join, you need a registered trademark and reports through Report a Violation within the last six months, with at least a 90% acceptance rate. To keep access, you need 99% accuracy. Amazon recommends a test buy before you remove a suspected counterfeit.

Elsewhere, eBay's VeRO Portal lets you submit reports and manage several brands in one place. Other marketplaces run their own forms and portals, and the Takedown Routes Index lists each route with the date it was last checked.

When do legal solutions make sense?

Early, for the cheap ones: a trademark application and clear ownership of your photos. Later, for the expensive ones: customs recordation once fakes ship in bulk, and lawsuits once a seller is big enough to be worth suing. A lawyer should handle anything contested.

Registration

A US trademark application has a base government fee of $350 per class on the USPTO fee schedule. Copyright registration isn't needed to send a takedown, but you can't sue over a US work until it's registered or refused (17 U.S.C. 411). The Copyright Office charges $55 to register a group of published photographs.

Customs

US Customs and Border Protection can record trademarks registered on the Principal Register, as long as the registration is current (19 CFR 133.1). The fee is $190 for each class you want recorded. Customs works at the border, so recordation suits brands whose fakes arrive as shipments, not brands whose problem is their photos on listings.

Court

Courts are where the large remedies sit. For counterfeit marks, a court can award statutory damages of $1,000 to $200,000 per counterfeit mark per type of goods, or up to $2,000,000 if the use was willful (15 U.S.C. 1117(c)). Sums like that are why the factory shipping your design by the container is a lawyer's job, not a form's.

Is product authentication worth it for a small brand?

Only if fakes of your product are sold as genuine on Amazon, or buyers often ask whether what they bought is real. Amazon Transparency puts a unique code on every unit, at $0.05 a code for the first 1 million a year (less at volume), so cost grows with units made, not products listed.

Transparency needs a GTIN for each product you enroll and charges no enrollment or subscription fee. Once protections are on, every unit needs a valid code or it won't pass the Transparency check. Customers can scan Amazon-issued codes to verify a product wherever they bought it, and Amazon says more than 2.7 billion units have been verified through the program.

Run the numbers before you sign up. At $0.05 a code, 10,000 units a year cost $500 in codes, before the work of labeling each one. Codes only protect the units that carry them, so they make most sense for a product you make in volume and that's worth faking.

How do you combine solutions without overspending?

Stack them in order of cost. Secure your rights and join the free platform programs first. Add monitoring and enforcement once copies outpace what you can report by hand, and save the expensive measures for the problems that need them.

Most brands need two or three brand protection solutions, not all five, and the cheapest ones, a trademark application and the free platform programs, come first. Monitoring plus enforcement is the pair most growing consumer brands add next, because that's where the hours go.

That pair is what brand protection software for growing brands like ours covers. Brand Protection Tools searches for copies of your products and photos, and once you confirm a copy, it prepares the notice with the evidence and the route for you to file. We're new, and we start with Etsy and Alibaba.com. Weighing up tools? Our guide to choosing brand protection tools has a scoring table.