Glossary
The terms you will meet in enforcement work, defined without the jargon.
- Brand Registry (Amazon)
- Amazon's program for brands with registered or pending trademarks, giving access to reporting tools and listing controls.
- Brand Rights Protection (Meta)
- Meta's tool for rights holders to search for and report content, ads and accounts across Facebook and Instagram that infringe their trademarks.
- Cease and desist letter
- A letter demanding that a party stop an activity. It has no automatic legal force; its effect comes from the rights it asserts and the consequences it describes.
- Counter-notice
- Under the DMCA, a response from the person whose content was removed, asserting a good-faith belief that the removal was a mistake. If valid, the platform may restore the content after 10 to 14 business days unless the rights holder files a lawsuit.
- Counterfeit
- Goods bearing a trademark identical or substantially indistinguishable from a registered mark, without authorization. Distinct from unauthorized resale of genuine goods.
- Copyright
- The exclusive rights an author holds in an original creative work, arising automatically when the work is fixed in a tangible form.
- Delisting
- Removal of a URL from a search engine's results for certain queries or regions. The page itself remains on its host.
- Designated agent
- The contact a service provider registers (in the US, with the Copyright Office) to receive DMCA notices.
- DMCA
- The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Section 512 creates the notice-and-takedown process and safe harbor for service providers.
- DSA (Digital Services Act)
- EU regulation requiring online platforms to operate notice-and-action mechanisms for illegal content, including intellectual-property infringement.
- Evidence pack
- The organized set of captures, originals, comparisons and ownership records attached to a report.
- Fair use
- A US doctrine allowing limited use of copyrighted material without permission for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching or research, assessed on four factors.
- Gray market
- Genuine goods sold through channels not authorized by the brand. Usually a contractual issue rather than a counterfeit one.
- Impersonation
- Presenting an account, page or site as being, or being affiliated with, a person or brand it is not.
- Likelihood of confusion
- The central test in trademark infringement: whether consumers are likely to be confused about the source or affiliation of goods or services.
- Lumen
- A public database that archives takedown notices and legal removal requests submitted to participating companies, including Google.
- Notice-and-takedown
- The procedure by which a rights holder notifies a provider of infringing content and the provider removes or disables it.
- Registrar
- The company through which a domain name is registered. Registrars have abuse policies and can act on domains used for fraud or infringement in certain cases.
- Repeat infringer policy
- A policy platforms must maintain under the DMCA to terminate accounts of users who repeatedly infringe.
- Right to be forgotten
- The EU and UK right for individuals to request delisting of search results about them that are inadequate, irrelevant or excessive.
- Safe harbor
- Protection from liability for service providers that follow the DMCA's requirements, including acting on valid notices.
- Trade dress
- The overall look of a product or packaging that identifies its source, protectable under trademark principles if distinctive.
- Trademark
- A word, name, symbol or design that identifies the source of goods or services and distinguishes them from others.
- UDRP
- The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, an arbitration process for recovering domains registered and used in bad faith that are confusingly similar to a trademark.
- VeRO (eBay)
- eBay's Verified Rights Owner program for reporting listings that infringe intellectual property.