Author: Christopher Hamel-Smith
If having made use of the available free Internet resources we have discovered no obvious conflicts, we should immediately move to secure our company's rights in our prospective trademarks and domain names. This means commissioning a professional trademark search, and registering our trademarks and domain names, in as many countries as possible, depending upon our e-commerce strategy and potential target markets.
A professional trademark search is relatively inexpensive, even though it will usually be necessary to cover a number of countries once we plan to do business on the Internet. Certainly, it will be far less expensive to discover any potential conflicts by conducting a search before we invest in branding our trademarks and domain names into the minds of our e-customers as certificates of the source and quality of our products and services. The costly alternatives to this up-front investment may be international litigation, or having to
