Protecting Your Brand - Interview with Joe Loomis of Net Enforcers
Allen Harkleroad

I imagine for companies that produce products it could be an even worse nightmare trying to track online auctions sales (i.e. eBay) and monitoring websites across the planet to make sure their brand isn't being tarnished, misused or worse.

Being the curious type, I began researching online for an easier way to discover, monitor and protect my copyrighted content and other intellectual property. Reason being I have become quite weary of manually tracking down rouge websites that are abusing my writer's hard work that I pay for.

I can tell you one thing there are quite a few companies offering intellectual property, brand monitoring and enforcement services. It was difficult to determine who was on the up and up and who were being shady.

I ended up contacting Net Enforcers out of Phoenix Arizona. I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from Joe Loomis the President and CEO of Net Enforcers Inc. One thing is for certain Joe and his group have the technology, know how and backing to do what they say.

I felt that I needed to share what I have found, as well and what Net Enforcers can offer companies in terms of protecting their intellectual property and digital assets.

Joe has granted me permission to post his replies to several of the questions I posed to him during our conversations.

Hi Joe, thank you for allowing this impromptu interview.

Thank you for this opportunity Allen.

How long has Net Enforcers been in business? How employees work for you?

Net Enforcers was founded in May of 2003 and currently trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol INTX. Our company or division specifically has about 60 employees while our parent company, Intersections has almost 1000 employees.

I am curious about the services that your company, Net Enforcers Inc, offers. Can you tell me a bit about service you offer and what each is geared towards?

In order to help brands regain control of their online reseller networks we offer services such as MAP Monitoring (Minimum Advertised Pricing), Intellectual Property Monitoring, and Forum Monitoring. MAP Monitoring has become significantly popular – and what this service works to accomplish is to automatically monitor authorized (and unauthorized) dealers selling a brand’s products and notify the brand of any violations of pricing or sales policies. Our Intellectual Property Monitoring is for brands that have a substantial amount of Copyright and Trademark abuse – we notify the brand of unauthorized use of these materials and they can choose to take action on the infringer.

We monitor Forums (blogs and news too) to inform brands of continual customer support issues, counterfeiting issues, and any harmful instances that they should be privy to. Listening to consumers and formulating trends of what they talk about can be time consuming for a brand owner to accomplish manually – so we bring it all to them in one consolidated area.  Beyond the scope of these services we also perform automated counterfeit detection for brands, we can map out a manufacturer’s online product supply chain, and even help a manufacturer create an authorized reseller program from scratch.

I've been following the news and have noticed of late that there has been a large number of Intellectual property items published. Has any of this affected your business?

Yes, as we still transform into a digital world, the amount of online activity around Intellectual property will continue to expand. It looks promising now to become an intellectual property attorney as the demand for their services seems to be on a rapid rise.

I own several online publications including digital download payment sites. What kind of services would you recommend to a company regarding preventing and tracking digital items such as music, eBooks, creative content, photos, etc?

Our Intellectual Property Monitoring would blanket all these items. We monitor most video websites such as YouTube for digital content abuse, and generally any website hosting copyrighted text, photos, or creative content that are published without proper consent.

Have you seen a growth in the need for Intellectual property tracking and enforcement in the last several years? If so what three things would you say, has driven this?

I would say that the increase in counterfeit, copyright and trademark abuse because of the transformation to a digital world has been the biggest reason for this. Imagine 10 years ago, we had to go to Canal Street in NY to buy a knockoff and now it’s available to anyone's browser. That’s an amazing increase in visibility to your end potential customers.

What Net Enforcers service would you say has grown the most in the last 12-24 months?

Counterfeit product detection on 3rd Party B2B sites like Alibaba.

I admit that I am curious how you manage to track all that you do. What type of system do you have in place to manage it?

We have a large array of proprietary technologies that have evolved over the years. These systems have been built to be extremely dynamic and resourceful for brand owners with unique and basic needs.

If you could give companies, one piece of advice in regards to Intellectual Property enforcement what would it be?

Make sure you complete your international registrations for your marks and of course hire Net Enforcers to protect your brand.

I appreciate your taking the time to talk with me. Is there anything would you like to add that I might have overlooked?

Thank you Allen for the opportunity to educate your readers. Also Net Enforcers is the only publicly traded and licensed private investigative agency in the US today. It’s my goal to continue to expand our services and offerings to continue to help corporations protect their intellectual property from the illicit dangers that the Internet exposes them to.

Once again thank you Joe for allowing me to interview you.

Thank you Allen, and keep up the good work.

For more information on Net Enforcers and their services visit www.netenforcers.com