BrandShelter’s monitoring services are the front-line of defense in the unyielding protection of your assets. We offer a holistic set of monitoring solutions to effectively and proactively discover, mitigate, and defend against abuse of your trademarks on the Internet.
BrandShelter provides global monitoring of the use of your brand on the Internet and provides you with comprehensive information about online activities related to your brand.
BrandShelter will monitor your domain registrations under all country-code top level domains (ccTLDs) and under more than 1,000 generic TLDs.
BrandShelter's Internet Monitoring provides information about who is using your company name, products or your brand names - in a website and in meta data.
With BrandShelter's mobile app monitoring tool, you'll learn what's happening in app stores regarding your brands and products. Get detailed reports on how your brands are being used in apps.
BrandShelter monitors online stores and auction platforms and informs you as soon as your product is offered for sale or auction.
Cybersquatting means the registration of domains that deliberately violate the IP rights of third parties. This includes using existing company or brand names within registrations. The aim for registrants is to prevent someone else from buying the domain in addition to exploiting it for their own gain, often for illegal activity or to ‘ransom’ the domain to a brand owner. An example would be the registration "brandname.shop" by a third party if the trademark owner has only registered the brandname.com or brandname.de domains. Another example would be the registration of an exact match ccTLD / new gTLD domain, prior to a brand owner adding it to their portfolio.
A domain registrant must be able to prove a legal intention to use the domain they have registered, otherwise the registration will be considered malicious and the registrant may be considered a domain squatter. As the registrant of such a domain prevents the legitimate trademark holder from registering and using that domain, the registrant acts illegally in those countries where proprietary, company and trademark names can be protected.
If proof of malicious registration can be provided in court, the domain registrant is threatened with a severe fine.
There are no explicit laws against cybersquatting in the United Kingdom. However, trademark owners can take action against cybersquatting for trademark infringement based on the Trade Mark Act 1994 and protect their name rights.
Typosquatting is the registration of domains that are identical to known names or brand names except for a typo, including using numbers and different character sets to impersonate the ‘real’ brand name characters. Once these domains are registered, the creation of fraudulent and counterfeit sites using these typo domains, in addition phishing attacks through email use, often follow. These pages are designed to ensure that the user does not notice the scam and enters their personal and payment details as usual.
Gripe sites are created to criticize people, places or companies. It is difficult to take action against this kind of cybersquatting. The operators of such sites are usually not out to make a profit, which is against malicious registration for profitable resale, and they actively use the domain, so they are not domain squatters. However, it is important to recognise when these sites have been registered so they can be monitored for activity.
