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Anti-scam: a call for cooperation

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

Defenceless users of IP registration systems benefit from better information

The MARQUES Class 46 weblog carries today a short post here, announcing the barest of beginnings of a list of websites that provide warnings and useful information for trade mark owners who wish to avoid being duped into making unnecessary and sometimes quite fraudulent payments for what they are misled to believing to be official services or valuable directory listings.

At present the list (which you can access here) is distressingly short. Information is provided from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), the European Patent Office (EPO) -- apparently via a page which can only be accessed by those in possession of a user name a and password -- and a small number of national or regional offices.

Information and advice on these websites is sometimes excellent, but too often falls well short of what this Kat regards as acceptable. Most have few links to other sites that provide further or similar information about scams, unwarranted demands and unsolicited offers; some lack contact details. Some are difficult to use and all could be improved simply by borrowing the best features of each others' sites.

The IPKat says, here is an easy way to help small, medium-sized, big and outsized IP owners, which need hardly cost anyone a penny:

(i)  every rights-granting office should provide an email address and phone number so that anyone who thinks he or she is being conned can either check up to see if the demand comes from  known source or at least alert the office in question;

(ii) each office should host a web page with as much useful information as it can muster, which can easily be found by a non-professional searcher who uses site-search terms like "scam";

(iii) the offices should have a LinkedIn group or other shared resource which enables them to communicate with one another, either when letting each other know of latest scams and payment demands or, as can happen, when conferring as to the legitimacy of a particular practice or the bona fides of a business that practises it.

Meanwhile, please let Class 46 know of any other national or other warning sites which it can add to its little list. That way, we can all work together to improve the position of the most vulnerable and unsuspecting of our rights-owners.

Full post as published by IPKat on March 01, 2011 (boomark / email).