Com Laude Watch & online brand protection enforcement

Life at the crossroads of traditional online IP protection and emerging AI technologies

Not that long ago companies were often oblivious to their IP being abused in the domain name space. Most infringing domain names would go undetected and only the most nefarious cases would reach the eyes and ears of brand owners. With no coherent strategy they would scramble to mount a response using the “whack-a-mole” approach. Realizing this gap in knowledge, and its potential danger, online IP protection specialists set out to design tools to address the issue of ongoing infringements.

And thus: domain name watching solutions were born! One such product is Com Laude Watch – an in-house developed AI enhanced domain name monitoring system that scours the domain space for infringing names.

Today brand owners can see what is happening with their IP in the domain name space in almost real time! Gone are the days of plain text reports that contained more false positives than actual relevant results. Com Laude Watch analyses and ranks each detected domain name on a threat ranking, whilst removing the false positives. This allows brand owners to focus their resources on the infringing domain names that are causing the most damage.

However, while companies like Com Laude have been busy developing new online brand protection solutions, the criminals and cybersquatters have not been sitting idly. The criminals learned that while one infringing domain name will bring in some money, ten infringing domain names will bring more! So, the criminals started scaling up their business and casting a wider net to catch more unsuspecting Internet users.

And this brings us to another particularly compelling feature of Com Laude Watch – its ability to establish often hidden patterns by grouping domain names together. These clusters can then be dealt with a single enforcement action, which a) presents a significant savings to brand owners; and b) dismantles abusive networks.

How does this look like in practice? A brand owner will be alerted to a single abusive domain name which they will want to neutralize, and neutralize quickly. Your average online brand protection specialist will happily run with these instructions and attempt to recover that single abusive domain name. With Com Laude Watch we can do more: we will locate that domain name on our watching system and with a few clicks find other domain names that fit the pattern. It might turn out that that single abusive domain name is a part of a larger group of 20 abusive domain names. This results in one quick enforcement action that recovers a cluster of abusive domain names; while the original approach results in recovery of a single abusive domain name, which does not even make a dent in the criminal’s network.

Do you wish to know more about how Com Laude Watch can help you efficiently and effectively protect your IP online? Then reach out to brandprotection@comlaude.com and we will show you our systems can effortlessly become core pillars of your workflow.