During the past decade and a half, the internet has grown from a small array of just a few thousand websites to a vast network of hundreds of millions of distinct sites, containing billions of web pages. Although the internet has presented a new frontier for both trademark use and infringement, the growth of social media sites during the past few years has posed particular challenges for brand owners. These sites, which include blogs, virtual worlds, marketplaces, image networks and relative newcomers such as Facebook and Twitter, allow users to interact with each other, effectively building a community.
With this landscape changing so rapidly, the first challenge for brand owners is simply to keep up with the evolving technologies and platforms. After all, five years ago, Facebook was a small private network for students at educational institutions and Twitter did not even exist; today, these platforms are a part of the daily lives of millions of users. In order to properly protect their brands and trademarks, brand owners should first plan to conduct regular assessments of the available social networking and Web 2.0 sites, with an eye to determining how popular these sites may be with the brand’s target consumers and the ease of using these sites for infringement purposes.
