Maral Behnam-Garcia on the Three Pillars for Brand Success

• Maral's personal journey and how she became specialized in IP protection, emphasizing the importance of trademarks and branding.
• How different stakeholders, including brands, marketplaces, and service providers, collaborate to combat counterfeiting
• The challenges of the "whack-a-mole" game in IP protection, emerging technologies, and evolving trends.
• The law's struggle to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology and the need for collaboration with technology companies.
• The impact of recent legislative acts like the Informer Consumer Act and the Consumer Safety Act on IP protection and how e-commerce platforms can leverage them.
• Maral's three pillars for success: IP protection, collaboration and education, and budgeting for enforcement.
• Predictions for the IP protection landscape in the next five years, emphasizing the need for continued collaboration and focus on source-level intervention.

#1)  We're all trying to do the same thing, and we're doing it from different perspectives. Brands are trying to support their brand, marketplaces are trying to enforce third-party rights, and service providers are also trying to bridge that gap as well. One thing I love is the fact that we're all trying to do the same thing. We're all trying to combat counterfeiting. I think everybody agrees that counterfeiting is something that's a very, very serious issue, one that's not talked about enough.

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#2) I think it's very easy to grab things from the Internet and grab things from other areas and be able to pass it off as your own. And I think that's what's happening with the emergence of technology. It's very easy to acquire thoughts and ideas that are not yours, because now the creative, the digital space is really pulling from different areas. And it's not so unique as it once was before. And so that's why IP infringement - and just general IP problems - have continued to rise is because the state of technology and the state of the digital presence is constantly evolving.

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#3) One of the things that I've always said is, if you want to combat counterfeiting, you really need to combat it at the source.

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#4) I see the state of IP protection kind of living the way that it is now, if not increasing even more. We can do legislative actions. We can do as much, but bad actors will always look for different opportunities to get there to continue doing what they do and continue getting counterfeit material out there.

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