Pulpou Brand Protection Platform

How to Know if Your Brand is Being Counterfeited on the Internet

Tracking counterfeit products can be a very simple task if you have the right tools. Technology and automation: what major brands do to protect the industrial property of their products.

The benefits offered by the Internet have allowed companies to significantly expand their sales reach. Today, marketplaces, own online stores, and social media enable more frequent and constant interaction with users who increasingly prefer new digital platforms for buying and selling operations.

However, these advantages have also led to the expansion of certain practices that were easier to combat not long ago: product counterfeiting. Product piracy has exponentially increased in recent years. What can a company do to know if their brand is being counterfeited?

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Internal Team and Manual Work

One of the alternatives to address the problem is to do it manually. Identify all the sales platforms where you suspect your products might be found and then get to work. Of course, doing it this way requires a significant effort and a limited capacity for the number of cases that can be detected per day. To facilitate the task, there are solutions like Pulpou, which automate the search. However, even when hiring these services, it is crucial to know how to search.

It is important to find patterns in the counterfeit listings. For this, it is very helpful to collect important information from each listing, such as the URL, product name, and price, among other data. To optimize the search for this type of listings, certain terms that are generally associated with piracy can be considered: "similar," "replica," "outlet," among others.

Once a filter is applied – for platforms and certain terms to narrow down the search radius – attention should be paid to certain indicators, such as the price, the sales channel, the logo, and the product photo. For example, a price significantly below the market average, an unrealistic logo, or the use of generic images can be red flags.

Another warning sign that a seller may be selling counterfeit products is if they have a limited variety but a large quantity of each model. Additionally, something to consider is that an individual seller may not have sizes or colors to choose from.

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How to Be More Effective?: Technology and Automation

While it is possible to work manually to tackle the problem, the number of suspicious cases circulating on the web makes it unfeasible to be 100 percent effective. Some brands encounter more than 3,000 counterfeit product incidents monthly. What internal team can handle that number of cases?

Therefore, since this issue is increasingly concerning to leading brands, part of the process can be automated to significantly increase the number of counterfeits discovered daily. As mentioned earlier, there are programs for searching and automatically managing information. Specific software can find counterfeit products by name, designation, and image.

For example, Pulpou has a web platform that allows monitoring and sending claimed infringement notices to more than 100 sites. Through this technology, it is possible to track already detected infringers to prevent future infringements, and it is also feasible to detect potentially suspicious cases.

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Expert Advice

Guillermo Navarro, a partner at BILDENLEX, a specialist in intellectual property, innovation, and technology law, anticipates that it is very important for brands to first identify the online buying and selling processes, the type of advertising being done, and how their product is being searched for and identified.

"Reputation and knowledge of what is said about the products – and also services – is fundamental. But everything always needs to have the brand registered in the corresponding classes of products and services. Don’t forget about domains and social media names. Also, one last important issue is that your brand is not used for Google Adwords because that is an infringement of your trademark rights if it is registered," adds Navarro.

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When is Industrial Property Infringed?

DDM Abogados explains that there are three ways: counterfeits, imitations, and copies. "The counterfeit product has been created or modified with the aim of being confused with the original, which corresponds to a brand and a company," they indicate. In the case of "imitation," it is different – they specify – since the aim is not to "confuse" the user and make the product appear original.

"Finally, there are copies. They are considered the most dangerous of the three since, being a copy of an original, they do not seek to confuse the person who acquires it. However, these copies do not meet any quality standards, which can pose a threat to safety and public health, depending on the markets we are dealing with," they elaborate.

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