The internet has opened many valuable opportunities for entrepreneurship. It’s easy for businesses and individuals to share brand messages, goods, and copies of creative works online to attract buyers. Unfortunately, this same opening has also made it convenient for intellectual property (IP) law violations.
In this post, you’ll learn more about IP infringement and why it’s important to protect intellectual property. We’ll also look at how SERP scraping and using a Google image search API can help you to stay ahead of the curve with intellectual property protection.
What is Intellectual property?
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First off, let’s understand what we are talking about when we refer to intellectual property in this post. Intellectual property (IP) is a category of intangible assets belonging to an individual or a company. In most cases, these are creations of the mind and legally protected by law through patents, trademarks, copyrights, and design registration.
Unfortunately, malicious people still try to steal protected intellectual property for their own gain. They violate intellectual property laws by committing copyright infringement, product cloning, disclosing company secrets, and patent assertion, among other tactics.
Due to increasing advancements in technology, IP theft is more common and significantly more difficult to protect from. The cost associated with said theft has similarly increased. A single fact needs to be considered to fully gauge the severity and the cost of IP infringement on a company. In the 21st century, it is not unusual to see the IP of a firm be responsible for up to 80% of its value. Therefore, the loss of the IP could be catastrophic for any business.
There are numerous risks associated with intellectual property theft. Businesses and individuals lose revenue due to IP theft. When a business loses revenue, unsurprisingly, many crucial areas get affected. It is not unusual for firms to lay off their employees as a measurement against inducing further financial problems. This, in turn, means people can lose employment due to IP infringements. Such loss of revenue and unemployment impacts a country’s GDP negatively.
These idlers not only look for opportunities to make some money out of your business but can also cause irreversible damage. For instance, copyright infringement can ruin a company’s reputation. A prime example of this is If another company clones your goods, your customers can think they are yours.
Unfortunately, fakes use low-quality materials and poor designs to make quick bucks. This might cause your customers to think that your company has started compromising on quality. Such a misunderstanding will cause your reputation to be seriously tarnished.
As you can see, violation of intellectual property laws has dire consequences to businesses, people, and nations. This calls for businesses and individuals to consider effective methods of guarding against IP property theft. Even if you get the necessary registrations, you can’t rely solely on government agencies to guard your creative works. It becomes important to adopt proactive tactics to mitigate intellectual property infringement and one of these efficient methods is Google scraping.
How can Google scraping help?
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Google scraping for anti-piracy involves collecting search engine data to monitor and detect acts of IP infringement. It uses SERP scrapers to crawl search engine results and identify pages where specified products or brand messages are posted. When using a Google image search API, it’s possible to collect all images posted online that relate to your products or brand messages. This exercise helps with IP infringement in various different ways:
1. Detect IP Thefts in Time
By scraping Google, you can analyze this data and detect an IP infringement incidence promptly. Google scraping gives up-to-date data. Use the tools to follow closely when and where your products are posted. This enables you to raise an alarm as soon as you notice illegal posts of your content or goods. You could also monitor posts of products that are related to yours and point out any close resemblance or intentional similarities.
2. Monitor online campaigns to detect brand infringement
Businesses and individuals can use Google scrapers to crawl website pages and social media platforms to determine copied brand messaging and images. It’s also easy to determine brand impersonation, domain theft, and other forms of piracy through using Google scrapers on social media pages.
3. Collect data to create a portfolio as evidence
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In case of IP infringement, you need an exhaustive portfolio to provide solid evidence that the other party copied your materials. Search engine directories carry large volumes of data in different formats. Going through billions of indexed pages to extract relevant data to support your claim takes time and a lot of effort. The best news is that you can gather this data effortlessly through Google scraping.
For instance, use a Google image search API to find all images of goods posted online that look like yours. Compare them with your original designs to show the similarities and discrepancies that point to copyright infringements. Additionally, use key features of the Google scrape tools such as timestamps and traffic source to show that you’ve been using the product images before the malefactors.
4. Obtain data to establish authentic partners to sell your goods
Business is about connections, but you need the right partners. Google scraping can help you curate a list of prospective influencers and genuine marketplaces to sell your work. You could establish a relationship with them in advance and always warn them when you notice counterfeits of your goods in the market.
Conclusion
It is unsurprising that in this day and age, where technological advancements are rapid and common, IP protection is essential. As discussed, the losses businesses might incur after IP theft are nothing short of disastrous. Therefore, applying an effective solution , such as Google scraping is a helpful measure towards intellectual property protection. Whether you are a business, developer, author, artist, or investor, monitoring where your intellectual property appears online enables you to stay ahead of malicious people. Consider a Google Image search API today – more details can be found here – protect yourself and stop online pirates on their tracks.
