Having a business means getting Intellectual Property Protection. Learn the advantages and the challenges businesses have when it comes to intellectual property protection.
This quick guide breaks down everything you ought to know about Intellectual Property Protection and how a top-notch proxy service provider can help you handle the job with much ease.
What is intellectual property protection?
Intellectual Property Protection essentially involves safeguarding the ideas of a business entity or an individual to prevent other people or organizations from reaping the benefits of their creations.
Having solid Intellectual Property Protection allows businesses to focus more on conducting research and development. As a result, their innovation and prosperity are bolstered.
Moreover, Intellectual Property Protection protects businesses and individuals from the threats of counterfeiting, piracy, and intellectual property theft. The reproduction of a business or individual’s ideas can be detrimental to their reputation and brand image.
Business entities and individuals can protect their Intellectual Property by using Copyrights, Patents, Trade Secrets, and Trademarks.
Challenges businesses encounter with intellectual property
Businesses face several intellectual property struggles that can tarnish their brand’s image and track record in the industry. Here are a few of those:
1. Piracy and counterfeiting
Many businesses get subjected to Intellectual Property infringement wherein their ideas or product offerings get reproduced by another business entity without their consent. Product counterfeiting is a prevalent issue across the global market to date. Moreover, product piracy and counterfeiting often result in the following business demerits.
- Impaired Brand Image: Once your products get counterfeited, your customers, business partners, and investors may start to doubt your business’s integrity.
- Valuable Sales Loss: Counterfeiters reproduce other brands’ products intending to sell them at lower costs to leverage the competition. As a result, your sales are undercut as many consumers might opt for the cheaper version of your products.
- Expensive and Lengthy Legal Process: If you decide to take legal action against the company that reproduced your creations, you need to be ready to spend a substantial amount of money for a long and backbreaking legal process.
2. Brand jacking
Brand jacking refers to an activity in which an individual or a group acquires or assumes another business entity or individual’s online identity to collect their business equity. In other words, brand jacking involves the act of using a brand or individual’s trademark unconstitutionally.
3. Abuse of trademark
Abuse of trademark includes unauthorized misrepresentation and impersonation, false advertising, as well as affiliation claims with a Trustmark.
4. Grey market
Grey market or also known as parallel market, refers to the distribution of a product outside the distribution channels approved by the manufacturer. Below are the detrimental effects of the grey market on a business entity.
- Undermined Profitability: The grey market involves selling products at a lower price than the imposed cost of the manufacturer. Once the products are offered at a lower cost, their profit margins are heavily affected.
- Damaged Brand Image: In case mishaps happen and customers file complaints about your products which they bought at the grey market, your brand’s reputation is going to suffer.
- Varying Market Prices: Because the grey market involves varying product prices that do not match the manufacturer’s set price, consumers can get confused.
How to make the job easier with proxies
In case you have not invested in a reputable proxy service provider yet, then you are missing out on the advantages it can offer to your brand. Moreover, proxy servers can also make the job of Intellectual Property Protection a lot less challenging through the features and functionalities they provide, such as the following. Also, check here how companies power up their brand security with proxies.
1. Proxies boost a business’ privacy and security.
The top-rated proxy service providers take pride in safeguarding their clients’ privacy and security by providing their networks with additional protection online. Proxies are programmed to protect a network against outside traffic risks and threats that can potentially interfere with the client’s private data and sensitive files.
2. Proxies ensure all business communications conducted online are encrypted.
If you often do team meetings and business conferences on the web, then you should invest in a premium proxy server.
Hackers can easily get into your business’s online communication and retrieve valuable business information. If you don’t want that to happen, then the best option is to encrypt your connections with a proxy server.
3. Proxies can anonymize your identity online.
If you need to carry out a task anonymously on the internet, then an impeccable proxy has you covered. Proxies are best-known for their ability to keep your identity anonymous while you are browsing the internet. As a result, hackers won’t be able to acquire any of your Intellectual Property and valuable business data.
Conclusion
To avoid all the detrimental effects of piracy, counterfeiting, trademark abuse, and other Intellectual Property troubles, you should invest in a reliable proxy server as soon as possible.