Protected By Cactus - A New Legal Service To Help Guard Your Intellectual Property

posted on: November 20, 2006

Protected by Cactus” is a suite of intellectual property protection services that Solid Cactus now provides to our clients. We have added Jonathan D. Tenenbaum, Esq. as General Counsel to our staff.

With the growth of e-commerce, online store owners must protect their intellectual property such as logos, slogans, artwork, product descriptions and other unique content from unscrupulous individuals looking to copy those items for their own financial gain. Stealing content from websites is very common, and the ramifications for the legitimate owner of that content can be loss of sales, exclusion from search engines, decrease in market share and dilution of product.

Initially, Protected by Cactus will offer three types of intellectual property protection: (1) website and related content copyrighting, (2) various trademark registration services, and (3) a “Watchdog” service by which Solid Cactus will scour the internet for infringing uses of a customer’s copyrighted material and halt these infringing and damaging uses of the customer’s content. Additional services will be developed around the needs and requests of customers.

Copyrights

Copyright protects a large variety of creative works. As copyright protection typically applies to websites, you can be entitled to copyright protection for most original text, photos and artwork associated with a site. We can register your work with the United States Copyright Office, which makes it easier and more economical to go after those who illegally copy your work. Registration gives you additional remedies and a more effective course of action in dealing with infringers of copyrighted material.

Work is essentially considered published (and automatically copyrighted) when the author makes it available to the public. However, to bring a lawsuit against someone for copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, you must register your copyrightable content. Without official registration, you can go after a site that copies your content, but only for actual business loss.

Trademarks

A trademark is a distinctive word, phrase, logo, domain name, graphic symbol, slogan, or other device that identifies the source of a product and distinguishes a manufacturer’s or merchant’s products from others. The thrust of trademark law is to make sure that trademarks don’t overlap in a manner that causes customers to become confused about the source of a product. Protected by Cactus can trademark a variety of different items and give you the proper legal protections.

Watchdog Service

Solid Cactus will conduct regularly scheduled extensive searches on the internet for infringing uses of our customer’s copyrighted material, such as text, artwork and/or photographs. Upon discovering infringement, we will immediately deliver Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices to the relevant search engines and internet service providers to instantly stop the infringing uses.

Why Protected by Cactus?

Registering a trademark can be a complicated and elaborate ordeal involving extensive research, forms and documents, constant communication and follow-up with the trademark office, and the other necessary scheduling and organization. Because of our knowledge of your business, it is much more efficient and effective for our clients to have us do it.

An Ounce of Prevention…

Our clients need to protect their copyrightable content. Since you spend countless hours and substantial amounts of money to develop those products and services it is critical to aggressively protect these important products and services. Protected by Cactus can provide that legal protection at a price you can afford.