I’m Mark Turnage, and I want to talk about how OpSec helps its clients with enforcement of their proprietary rights. So one of the questions we’re asked is: If OpSec can authenticate a product through the supply chain and find ways that that product is being sold online unlawfully, what do you then do about it?
And what OpSec does about it is we work extremely closely with our clients on a broad variety of enforcement activities that allow us and allow our clients to go and enforce their rights against the counterfeiters. Let me give you some examples. OpSec has gone with its clients on raids of counterfeiters’ establishments to be able to be onsite to authenticate products and tell law enforcement officials whether product in that establishment is, in fact, fake. We go in with the clients, we will accompany them on these raids, and allow them to access the technologies and see whether this product is real or fake, and with law enforcement there onsite with us. Secondly, we work with our clients to identify counterfeits.
Oftentimes our clients will send counterfeits to us and ask us to forensically identify those for law enforcement or for judicial purposes. So we provide an entire array of forensic services on counterfeits so that our clients know that they can go into a court of law and actively enforce their rights against the counterfeiters. In the online space, what OpSec does is it actively goes into the online environment and combats counterfeiting. For example, on behalf of a client, we will go to an auction site, to a broad variety of auction sites and actively, on a daily basis, shut down auctions of known counterfeit merchandise. If you’re a brand owner and we are working on your behalf, and we see a counterfeit product being sold on an auction platform, we will go into the auction platform and shut those products down.
In a file sharing network, in a file sharing environment, we will penetrate those file sharing environments and actively work to identify who the first placers are of media that should not be on those sites. So for example, if somebody is actively placing movies or actively placing music onto file sharing networks, we have helped law enforcement identify who the first seeder is, who’s the first person who’s putting that onto that file sharing network, and it’s resulted in a broad variety of stings and seizures globally to help our clients enforce their digital rights.
Many geographies around the world, however, have very weak legal systems to allow our customers to enforce their rights, and in those environments we have to be creative with our clients in designing enforcement solutions. An example of that would be our new mobile authentication platforms, where we actually enlist the consumer to be the eyes and ears on the ground and tell us where the counterfeits are being sold and whether a product is in fact a counterfeit or not. So there are a broad variety of solutions that we can use working with our clients, working with their lawyers, working with private investigators, that allow our customers to actively enforce their proprietary rights with respect to their brands. OpSec is a uniquely positioned company. With our global platform and with our deep and fundamental knowledge of the issues associated with counterfeiting, we’re uniquely positioned to help our customers address these problems.
