Piracy & Copyright Investigations

Protecting your Intellectual Property : Copyright theft and piracy

[]The realisation that one's web site or copyrighted material has been pirated can be a distressing shock for the business owner.

Amaryllis Design Agency Ltd are not IP lawyers but have a wealth of commercial experience, and can offer a priority reporting/ investigation service to help you analyse the impact of an IP theft perpetrated via the Internet.

At a difficult time for an affected business, we will offer valuable support and try to help stabilise matters. In some cases, we can help instigate direct legal action in conjunction with specialist IP lawyers.

Intellectual Property theft

The advance of the Internet poses a new problem for businesses: the potential for intellectual property (IP) theft, fraud and piracy is escalating.

Fortunately, most users are sophisticated and discriminating enough to recognise obvious frauds such as 419 advance fee fraud, phishing or other scams.

Yet Internet fraud still reap dividends for creative fraudsters, otherwise they would stop bothering. Criminals reach out worldwide via spam, money laundering or phishing campaigns, and thousands of individuals are reportedly engaged in various online fraud schemes in the UK alone. You should never engage with such people.

Whilst some criminal efforts can be dismissed outright, many utilise devious "social engineering" methods and advanced technical skills, fuelled by organised crime. Today businesses and consumers face a greater threat from Internet fraud than ever before. Villains will ruthlessly defraud innocent victims, and they often stay one step ahead of the authorities, who unfortunately are not always as responsive or sympathetic as they should be.

Some effects of IP theft

Piracy and IP theft may involve the unauthorised use of your material on another web site, deliberate copying it or passing off of your style, the circulation of your copyrighted material, corporate identity theft, piracy of domain or company names, addresses and so on.

The act of infringing IP (e.g. by hijacking a web site design, brand name or a copyrighted file) can seriously affect its owners, whose brand may be devalued and their reputation harmed, just by being associated with a fraud.

Piracy and copyright theft can do untold damage to legitimate businesses. On the next page we highlight some typical cases and how we assisted clients in resolving the problems caused by Internet piracy or fraud.

On to Case Studies