“We’re being sued!” That’s never a good way to begin a dialogue. My client was upset because he had just received a letter from the law firm of a competitor. My client had infringed on this competitor’s trademark, and didn’t even know it.

The story sounded so innocent. The webmaster of my client’s website had put the competitor’s name and trademarked product names in the meta tags on the home page—without direction or permission from my client. When web surfers used search engines to look for the competitor or their products, there was a good chance my client’s site would come up too. Now this trademark squatting by the webmaster had my client in hot water.

Look Before You Reap
I’m not a lawyer, but I know to stay away from other people’s trademarks. In the United States, trademarks are formally registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Once registered, the owner of the trademark is entitled to use the ® in association with the registered mark. It’s pretty easy to check if an item has been trademarked; visit www.uspto.gov and use the trademark search function.

Although company names and names of individuals might not be formally trademarked, I like to stay away from them as well. You may remember a few years back when people bought domain names of companies and celebrities on speculation, hoping to sell them for big bucks. Instead, courts determined they had no legal rights to the domain names, and they lost them.

Take a Peek
Are your competitors squatting on your trademarks? Here’s a simple search that I sometimes do for the benefit of my clients. Using Internet Explorer as your web browser, go to the home page of one of your competitor’s websites. On the menu bar, click [View], then [Source]. A notepad window will open showing the computer code that generated the web page you’re looking at. Any meta tags will be contained in this window, usually right near the top. You can browse through it to look for your company name, product names or names of prominent officers.

To make your search easier, you may want to use the CTRL-F function. In fact, this search capability works in most Microsoft products. Simply hold down the [Ctrl] key, then press the letter “F.” A dialogue box named Find will open; insert the term you’re looking for, such as your company name, and press [Find Next]. It will allow you to find all instances of that term for the page you have open.

Of course, your competitor may have embedded your trademarked names on any of their web pages, not just the home page. If you really want to be thorough, you’ll have to repeat the search function on all the pages.

Hide and Seek
While checking for trademark squatting on behalf of one of my clients, I found a competitor who was using my client’s name in their meta tags. An e-mail from my client to the squatter’s CEO was enough to bring the problem to light and get it corrected. Again, the squatter’s webmaster did it without the CEO’s knowledge. The squatter was happy to do the right thing and remove my client’s name from his meta tags. No lawyers were involved.

Stop the Leak
As I talked with my client facing the lawsuit, I learned that there was really no lawsuit at all—yet. The letter from the competitor’s law firm was more of a “warning shot across the bow” to get my client to pay attention. And pay attention he did. The meta tags were quickly changed, and he avoided paying lawyers, court costs or damages for his innocent trademark-squatting episode.

You may not be so lucky. Trademark infringement is serious, and can become a costly affair. Check with your legal counsel to understand what you can and can’t do in this area, and then take steps to make sure your competitors are playing fair too. Your good company name and registered trademarks are valuable company assets that help you com-pete in your marketplace. Don’t let trademark squatting un-dermine your marketing efforts.

Paul Johnson, of Shortcuts to Results, LLC, consults, trains and speaks on ways to help people take and manage risks to create breakthroughs at their company. Check out more shortcuts at http://ShortcutsToResults.com. Call Paul direct in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, at 770- 271-7719.