At risk online: your good name
The Web presents 3 billion places where someone might besmirch your most prized asset.
Seeking some research from the Brookings Institution for this intellectual capital package, we recently typed brookingsinstitution.com into our browserâ€"and got a grotesque, unexpected eyeful. Instead of the think tank's home page, we saw a graphic photo of an aborted fetus, on a page titled "Abortion Is Murder."
This wasn't Brookings' contentâ€"it's the page you get at the URL abortionismurder.org. The right-to-lifers were cybersquatting, using Brookings' name to bring more eyeballs to their message. And until we alerted Brookings (which is at brookings.edu or brookingsinstitution.net), they didn't know about it.
"Oh, this is lovely," said spokesperson Derek Roseman when we let him know. Then he told his boss, whoâ€"he puts it mildlyâ€"groaned. In short order, Brookings' lawyers issued a cease-and-desist order to the site's owner. "How many other people who tried to find our Web site went to this site instead?" Roseman lamented.
Brookings hoped its cease-and-desist notice would put an immediate end to the grisly scene at Brookingsinstitution.com. It didn't. After the order, the owner of the antiabortion site redesigned it, using stylish fonts and snazzier navigation tools to update its former homespun look. The registrant contacted Brookings by e-mail, admitting it had been waiting for just such a letter from Brookings and denying the antiabortion site capitalized on the institution's good name. "It was rather pompous of you to say that Brookings marks are any form of goodwill," the email declared. "Look we know you could kick our ass in court even if we were right. So we're willing to give up the name, but we expect some compensation to go through the trouble. We registered it before you fair and square."
The Net may offer businesses new ways to leverage their intellectual capital, but it also brings unprecedented new risks to what may be a company's most prized intangible asset of allâ€"its good name. From outrageous lies to damning truths, from illegal Web tricks to First Amendment-protected opinion sitesâ€"assaults from competitors, disgruntled consumers, and day-trading charlatans can hurt brand value, stock prices, and sales.
Cybersquatters are out there buying domain names, hoping to sell them back to youâ€"meanwhile displaying whatever content they want in your name. Porn sites embed the names of more mainstream brands (from Playboy to Disney) within their HTML code as meta tags and hidden text, hoping to get listed when Web surfers seek the established names at search engines. In online financial chat rooms, cybersmears have driven down the stock prices of companies like Dendrite and Titan. Ex-employees and protest groups set up "anti domains" like Homedepotsucks.com to attack company policies and encourage boycotts. Complaint sites like Epinions.com and eComplaints.com exist so customers can rail against rude sales clerks, unscrupulous car dealers, and shoddy productsâ€"or let people bare their personal grudges against you.
So what do you do? If you had to scour through the more than 3 billion pages on the Web, it would be difficult to protect your company's image. Companies can monitor the Net with Web clipping services from CyberAlert and Cyveillance, or limit their scope, choosing to focus on what will hurt them most. How you react to each attack can either protect your good name or drag it deeper into the mud. As our examples here will illustrate, bringing out the heaviest artillery first can backfire. Legal threats and action often work, but they can also escalate a bad situation, encouraging an offender to push things further or drawing more publicity to the problem than the attack alone did.
Verizon Communicationsâ€"the company formed from the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTEâ€"is a veteran of having its names held for ransom by cybersquatters. "The Bell Atlantic brand, before the merger, had been subject to over 1,000 domain name infringements," says Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel at Verizon. Bell Atlantic fought these squatters and won back 91 of the domains. Upon becoming Verizon, the company tried to get a jump on the squatters, registering more than 500 domain names to protect each business unit and product. It even registered Verizonsucks.com. "When you have a new brand, a name change, the last thing you can afford is having consumers confused as to who you are," says Deutsch. Yet despite all the planning, during its first month as a new company 400 domains were registered by outsiders using the name Verizon or one of its other brands, says Deutsch. One was Verizonreallysucks.com.
Verizon's lawyers slapped a cease-and-desist order on that site's registrant, and that made matters worse: the anti-phone-company hacker magazine 2600, owner of Verizonreallysucks.com, took the site live, posted the cease-and-desist order on the site, and said that Verizon was trying to interfere with its right to free speech. Before the cease-and-desist order, Verizonreallysucks.com was an inactive site; now it had become an anti domain, posting content critical of the company. Verizon backed off. According to Deutsch, antidomains are not the telecommunications giant's main concern. Illegal use of its trademarked names is. "Generally we are dealing with cases where we're trying to protect our customers against consumer fraud and confusion or people who are otherwise just stealing our brand to divert traffic" for commercial purposes, she says.
FRIENDS - Regarding Corporate America, think you will enjoy the first 3 chapters of my upcoming book, I LEAP OVER THEIR HEADS!, regarding General Electric (GE) and their reprehensible behavior. You can read them by going to www.edwardbaskett.com.