Hi. This is Enzo F. Cesario with another edition of the Brandsplat Video Report. Today we’re talking to Daniel Greenberg who is the Director of Domain Name Management and Online Brand Protection for the company Lexsynergy. He's also a practicing attorney who specializes in Internet Law and Trademark Law. He's coming to us, from all places, Vienna. Thanks for being here, Daniel.

DANIEL: Thank you.

ENZO: Can you tell us a little bit about brand protection? Can you define that for us?

DANIEL: Brand protection involves various methods that allow a brand owner to prevent third parties from infringing upon their particular mark. So, for instance, buying a trademark, registering a domain name, registering copyrights, patents and designs where applicable. In essence, it prevents third parties from using the particular mark unlawfully. So, for instance, the word Brandsplat would be a trademark, the domain name is Brandsplat.com and the layout and content of the site would be copyright. So, all these put together is intellectual property, which amounts to brand protection.

ENZO: So is your domain name an online trademark? Can you expound on that?

DANIEL: Yes, it has become a species of online trademark. For instance, most people do their business online, they shop online, they bank online; and if you don't have control of your brand over the Internet, it will be very difficult for customers to locate you. So, if you had to compare it to the bricks-and-mortar world, it's almost the signage that is outside your business. For instance, in the online world, if you don't control your particular mark or your brand and it's as if your competitor has taken your particular mark and put it outside his store. So it has become a brand identifier on the Internet.

ENZO: I see. So how has Lexsynergy protected their brand online?

DANIEL: Okay. When we first started off we were very cost-conscious, so what we started off with is we did a Google search and a free online trademark search, which you can do with several data bases online to see if anyone else was using the name we came up with which was Lexsynergy, which is an invented word which doesn't mean anything, so it's easier to protect. We then secured the domain name in all generic top-level domains, such as Com, net, org, info, biz, tel (e.g. Lexsynergy.com, Lexsynergy.tel etc) , and in the countries where we trade or intended to trade. Country code top-level domains or ccTLD (e.g. Lexsynergy.co.uk or Lexsynergy.us) We secured those. And once we had done those, we branched off and started to file trademarks to protect ourselves. And obviously, trademarks are more expensive so we did that at the end as the business grew.

ENZO: Those can be very expensive. How would you advise a business that doesn't have a lot of resources to protect their brands online?

DANIEL: I would start off by -- like I said -- coming up with a unique name first, just to make sure that no one else in your particular industry is using that particular mark. I would also try to find an inventive word such as Google or Kodak -- those words that mean nothing. For instance, Apple is a very good trademark for computer products in a computer store, but a very poor trademark for a grocery store because it's descriptive of what it would be selling. So come up with a unique name, then do these online searches through social networking sites or search engines and if they're available; go for the domain names, then go for the trademarks. And just remember trademarks are territorial, which means that you only get protection in the country in which you register the mark, and domain names are international, in that they give you international exposure. So I would advise to go that route.

ENZO: Great. That is lot of useful information. Thank you, Daniel Greenberg. Thanks for being with us. This is Enzo Cesario, and I guess we'll see you next time.