Some corporations are taking steps to guard their brands and trademarks from copyright infringements online. A Digital Brand Asset Management company called Nameprotect “engages in crawling activity in search of a wide range of brand and other intellectual property violations that may be of interest to our clients“.
Word to bloggers, your blog may be crawled by a webcrawler seeking for illegal uses of trademarks, just like Josh’s World was (no, he hadn’t done anything illegal, probably just mentioned a brand name in one of his posts). Now, I guess that blogs aren’t the primary target for these webcrawlers, and Nameprotect says they are honoring robots.txt files so that any site owner can block out crawlers, but I can’t help but wonder what other webcrawler applications the future will have in store, ones that aren’t working by the same ethical standards as Nameprotect.
Bloggers should (apart from follow the law of course) start to learn about how robots crawl their sites and what to do about it. I can’t see why for example owners of copyrighted photos can’t crawl blogs to find illegal uses of their material.