TM.Biz Lets You Track Trademarks on Social Media
By Anna Johnson on June 15th, 2010Want to know if anyone has registered your trade mark as a username on a social network? TM.Biz from domain name registrar EnCirca is a new tool that brand owners, trademark lawyers, domain name resellers and marketing managers can use to search, reserve, and watch usernames on the Internet’s top 500 social networks.
The TM.Biz Search service performs a real-time exact search of usernames across the 500 top social networks. Users can segregate results by brand or client, review their search history, generate in-use reports of taken accounts and share their searches with colleagues and clients.
Currently in beta, the TM.Biz tool has three main components: TM.Biz Search, TM.Biz Reserve and TM.Biz Watch.
The TM.Biz Reserve service also lets trademark owners create accounts on these social networks. TM.Biz completes all the stages of establishing user accounts: initiating the sign-up process, adding contact information and verifying that accounts are active.
The TM.Biz Watch service is an automated monitoring service that monitors over 500 social networks and notifies trademark owners via email if someone reserves their brand as a username.
According to EnCirca, the TM.Biz tool meets the growing need of brand owners to protect their trade marks in social media.
Whilst user names and accounts on social networks are assuming an important role in branding, they lack protection mechanisms trademark owners enjoy with domain names.
There is no dispute policy such as UDRP (ICANN’s Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) to recover infringing trademarks; there is no public whois to determine the identity of who controls a user name; and there are no anti-cybersquatting laws designed to prevent consumer confusion over the source behind a trademark.
In fact, according to EnCirca, most of the social networks do not even have a policy for recognizing the rights of trademark owners.
Yet, there’s no question they are valuable. Indeed, an aftermarket for the re-sale of social network accounts has emerged, with auction sites such as eBay offering users the ability to sell their accounts to one another for hundreds of dollars.
The ability to resell accounts has led some users to warehouse thousands of names in hopes they might sell them later. In fact, one individual has amassed over one million Facebook accounts for resale.
EnCirca is inviting beta testers for TM.Biz. If you’re interested visit TM.biz.
