Monitoring your intellectual property with web scraping

Taking the necessary steps to protect your original work is crucial

In the past, physical assets were the critical assets of any company. That included workers, buildings, vehicles, machines, and all other materials used in the business. However, the importance of assets changed as the years went by.

Today, the most valuable asset of any company is its intellectual property. Whether that’s an idea, a trade secret, or a patent, companies need to go great distances to protect their intellectual property from any infringers.

Although it may sound easy, intellectual property protection is among the most challenging tasks every company has to carefully and continuously deal with. For that reason, check out this article to find out more about intellectual property and how you can monitor it with web scraping.

Intellectual property in the digital age

In today’s digital age, companies and brands pay close attention to the protection and security of their intellectual property. Essentially, intellectual property can be anything from a secret recipe to an entire patent created or invented by a particular company.

So, because of the wide range of possibilities, intellectual property today includes:

1. Trademarks

Trademarks are often the most popular intellectual property of a brand since they include logos, names, slogans, phrases, symbols, or sounds. Essentially, a trademark can be anything a brand is easily recognized for.

2. Copyrights

Copyrights include more artistic works, such as novels, poems, songs, or paintings. It’s a useful way to protect any expression of an idea from potential theft. Additionally, the owner of the copyrighted work has the power to change, sell, or reproduce the work.

3. Patents

Patents are a way of protecting inventions from unlicensed productions. Once a brand or company patents an invention, no one can use it, make it, or sell it except the patent holder.

4. Trade secrets

A trade secret can be a chemical formula, recipe, or any kind of idea created or invented by someone from the company. Then, the brands register their creation or invention as a trade secret – or a highly confidential company secret that adds value to their business.

The implications for modern businesses

However, many companies don’t feel the need to protect their intellectual property and often become victims of various counterfeiting and infringement actions. Some of the most common intellectual property crimes include:

1. Counterfeiting – unauthorized creation of the existing products and using a popular brand’s name to sell the goods.
2. Copyright infringement – unauthorized use of the copyrighted property.
3. Trademark infringement – unauthorized use of existing logos, phrases, symbols, or any other brand-associated patterns.
4. Patent theft – unauthorized manufacturing or selling of a patented product.
5. Design theft – similar to patent theft. However, here the counterfeiter is only using the appearance of a product.

To successfully protect intellectual property, maintain reputation, have control over the quality, sales, and customers, it’s essential to ensure there aren’t any counterfeiting and infringement actions related to your business. Taking the necessary steps towards intellectual property protection is crucial from the very beginning of each company.

The role of web scraping in IP protection

Web scraping is a quite useful and powerful tool with many purposes. Essentially, it’s a process of gathering millions of data across the internet. With its wide use, you can also use web scraping for IP protection.

Now more than ever, all companies, brands, and manufacturers use the internet and online shops to sell their goods. Although this gives them global popularity, specific companies often take advantage of the available brand and product information to counterfeit the products and get financial benefits.

Namely, web scraping enables you to go through thousands and millions of websites in the desired niche. In this way, you can quickly find out if someone is trying to counterfeit and sell products that your brand protected through patent, trademark, or copyright laws.

The process of using web scraping for asset protection

The process of web scraping is quite easy and fast. All you need is a computer and a special program intended for web scraping. Then, set your desired niche, keyword, or image for a program to use as a reference.

For example, you can use the image of your product from a website to see if someone is trying to sell their version of your creation. Also, entering keywords such as product names, slogans, and phrases will quickly highlight all the websites using your IP with no permission.

After this, you can easily trace the sources and start any legal action that is required.

The main benefits of web scraping for IP protection purposes are ease of use and efficient process. Namely, you don’t have to be an expert to do some web scraping on your own, and the entire process is fast, simple, and convenient.

However, when scraping large amounts of public information, the process involves several challenges. If you dig deeper into the topic, you will come across proxies as the best means to outsmart those challenges and get quality data from the web. For a start, visit Oxylabs and read more about efficient web scraping for intellectual property protection.

Conclusion

Finally, protecting IP is a challenging task that needs constant work. However, with web scraping, this time-consuming task can turn into a simple and fast one.

It’s never been easier to detect counterfeit products and companies that use your protected rights without authorization and put a stop to it before it’s too late.