APPS AND INFRINGEMENT


In the rapidly expanding app marketplace, entertainment rights owners are feeling the heat more than ever as they try to control the mobile channel. TB&I investigates some novel ways of combating the bad actors.


Apps can be both wildly popular and frustratingly addictive. Excited consumers flock in their masses to download the latest game, gimmick or genuinely useful tool. In September, technology research firm Gartner predicted that the total number of mobile apps downloaded will reach 102 billion by the end of 2013, up from 64 billion last year, before leaping to nearly 270 million in 2017.


Apps provide exciting business opportunities, oſten without demanding bundles of cash or years of experience, but infringement in this world can be rife. “Te app marketplace can seem like a lawless new frontier,” says Andrzej Zamoyski, co-creator of Hungry Oni, an app game in which collecting and consuming strange objects is the name of the game.


Infringement has many faces. Fraudsters target unwitting consumers to harvest their bank details. Pirates link to websites providing access to illegal downloads. Copycats mimic popular brands. While banks have


traditionally been


targeted most, especially as they increasingly see mobile channels as a preferred route to market, entertainment rights owners are under special pressure as they try to control the mobile channel.


Te rise of app infringement goes hand in hand with a surge in Internet use on mobile devices. According to US company Cisco, which sells networking equipment, 26 percent of


Internet


traffic in 2012 originated from mobile devices, but by 2017 that figure will jump to nearly 50 percent. In 2009, it was just 0.9 percent.


“Te growth has been quite extraordinary,” says David Franklin, global sales director, brand protection at NetNames, a brand protection company. “As people moved in droves from PCs and laptops to smartphones, it was inevitable that malware would speed its way to the new device of choice. Te ease with which mobile apps can be replicated or adulterated leaves users exposed to fraud, security breaches and other


www.worldipreview.com


acts of piracy. It’s happening almost faster than we can follow it in real time.


“Te entertainment industry has had a chance in the past to address piracy in ‘traditional’ Internet channels and it is going to face a very similar issue in controlling content on mobile devices, particularly when the take-up in China and other Asian countries is extraordinary. Tey face an intense challenge to how they roll out legitimate services to mobile device users in those kind of countries.”


Despite the rising dominance of mobiles, awareness of app infringement is quite low among the general public, explains Franklin. Te banking and entertainment sectors are more alive to the threat, he notes, as they have been used to online infringement for a long time, but some companies are far more proactive at brand protection than others, even within the same sector.


Tis situation poses two important questions: why are some brands struggling to keep up to speed with app infringement, and what should they be doing to tackle the problem?


For starters, users are oſten less educated about what infringement looks in the app sphere compared with the more ‘traditional’ problems of online counterfeiting or piracy, allowing infringers to trade heavily off consumers’ ignorance.


In addition, app marketplaces such as the App Store and Google Play are not easy to monitor for bad actors, says Franklin.


“App marketplaces are less transparent than the Internet and are challenging comprehensively,


requiring special capabilities


to do so. Te smaller screens of mobile devices and slower download times add to the opacity. In short, it’s much easier to miss badly replicated details and brand markers that, on a larger screen, would send up a red flag.


“Also, putting up new apps on a store is quite a Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 2, Issue 4 15 to search


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