As a website attorney and entrepreneur, I find that you can learn from offline businesses too. There’s a Wisconsin restaurant that’s protected its unique selling proposition (USP)…and it isn’t the pickled herring you can order off the menu.
You eat at the restaurant so you can watch goats grazing on its grass-covered roof.
What the restaurant owner did to protect his USP was register the trade dress (the restaurant’s goats-on-a-roof theme) so that others can’t compete without paying a licensing fee to put goats on top of their restaurants.
And if someone tries to steal the concept without paying, the restaurant’s lawyers stop the infringement from occurring.
You’ve got your particular USP (cyber-goats?) that attracts visitors to your website. If you’re not protecting the intellectual property (trademarks, service marks, trade dress, copyrights, etc.), you’re giving away your edge to your competitors who will copy you. You can do this yourself (the hard way) or have your website attorney do the work for you.
Protect your website’s goats and profit by doing so.
To your online success!
-Mike the Website attorney
Simply because a trademark owner hasn’t used his trademark in a domain name, Facebook profile name, Twitter name, or other social media does not mean that you can grab the name and use it to drive traffic to your business. This is the same trademark infringement issue one sees where a business uses its competitor’s trademark as a keyword in a Google AdWords campaign.