We thank all of the participants for contributing and sharing their expertise with us. Member companies are randomly chosen each month to participate as a way to connect and educate our member community. To view our previous member spotlights, click here.
Director, Intellectual Property, Community and Government Relations
Nazareth, Pennsylvania, USA
What is your role in your company/organization?
As the Director, Intellectual Property, Community and Government Relations at Martin Guitar I am responsible for advising internal clients and collaborating with In-House General Counsel and outside specialty counsel on a wide range of legal, regulatory and Intellectual Property matters, including but not limited to trademark portfolio management, copyright portfolio management, patent portfolio management, domain name portfolio management, trade secret and contract management. In addition to the ongoing refinement and protection of Company Intellectual Property and contract management, I participate in public policy advocacy and continually strengthen Martin Guitar's relationship with various community, industry, governmental and advocacy groups.
What are your top 2-3 best moments of 2021?
a.I received a Notice of Allowance for the Martin patent application entitled “Acoustic Stringed Instrument Body with Partial Taper Soundboard Recurve.” This allowance was issued with only one Office Action when some patent applications drag on with many Office Actions over lengthy periods.
b. I participated in the IACC's SME Task Force. The SME Task Force guided the IACC in developing practical brand protection programs and resources. The group met throughout 2021 to develop an SME Toolkit that will be published in 2022. The toolkit contains the tools, strategies, methods, and tactics for protecting a brand owner's trademarks, copyrights, and domain names.
What’s one piece of advice you can give a brand looking to enforce their IP?
An IP protection strategy should involve everyone, including production workers, managers, company officers, suppliers, distributors, and retailers. The goal is to engrain a mindset that everyone has a stake in the company’s IP, and that every counterfeit product represents a lost sale. A company’s IP protection policies should be in writing. These policies should be distributed to all employees, suppliers, retailers, and relevant affiliates. Employees, suppliers, and retailers are often in a good position to detect counterfeit goods. Be sure to educate them about your IP enforcement policies, and how to identify and report counterfeit goods.
What's the most rewarding part of your job / what is the thing that you've been most proud of in your anti-counterfeiting work?
As an IACC brand member, I represent Martin at U.S. CBP training events under the U.S. Law Enforcement IP Training Program. IP rights-holders provide individualized instruction to strengthen efforts and increase ability to deter sales of counterfeit products. In 2020 U.S. CBP officers in Washington, DC seized 36 counterfeit guitars that, if authentic, would have amounted to nearly $160,000. The instruments arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport from China and included many fake Gibson, Fender, Martin and PRS guitars. Based on the training and Martin product guide, import specialists from CBP were able to verify that the Martin instruments were counterfeits.
How did you get into brand protection?
Like many other American companies, C. F. Martin & Co., Inc. had become the victim of unauthorized registration of its traditional trademark and of counterfeiting of its products in the PRC. Specifically, Martin had become aware that its well-known script logo had been registered in the PRC by a Chinese citizen without Martin's consent. This individual used Martin's classic trademark on booths and displays at music trade shows in China and on guitars that were poorly crafted counterfeits of Martin guitars. In 2013, Martin created a new position in brand protection. I accepted the position and obtained my Master of Jurisprudence degree in IP Law. And I am proud to say that Martin regained its trademark in the PRC in 2016.
I am a product manager at CSC, part of an experienced team dedicated to providing effective and innovative brand and fraud protection services to our clients.
What are your top 2-3 best moments of 2021?
As the daughter of a retired U.S. navy captain and with other close ties to the U.S. military, I help support a local organization working with U.S. veterans of all ages with housing, meal delivery, groceries, and other services. Despite the challenging circumstances we faced globally last year we still managed to celebrate our organization’s two-year anniversary by bringing together volunteers, local businesses, and veterans. As normal activities like travel and family get-togethers were put on hold, I decided to expand my musical skills and learn to play acoustic guitar, which is a very enjoyable but slow process!
What makes your company unique?
CSC is a longtime advocate for intellectual property rights. We’re one of the largest ICANN-accredited corporate domain registrars. We provide domain management and security, brand and fraud monitoring and enforcement, and domain recovery services for global brands. Over the past 22 years, CSC has developed excellent relationships with major online marketplaces, domain registrars, ISPs, social media sites, and app stores. These trust-based relationships truly make a difference in our enforcement analysts delivering enforcement actions for our clients, battling counterfeiters and unauthorized product listings. The combination of brand and fraud protection alongside domain security provides highly effective protection for our clients.
Can you provide your top 2 best practices for protecting IP?
It’s essential to be proactive and flexible to fully understand how your brands are affected online, and respond appropriately. One-size-fits-all strategies prove ineffective over time, as monitoring and enforcement needs vary depending on the product or service, and global markets. Bad actors pivot quickly, and brand owners must be ready to switch to the best methodologies to combat them. Threats to domain security, reputation and brand value constantly evolve, so monitoring and enforcement programs must be agile. A flexible digital brand protection provider with the technology and expertise to pinpoint the most damaging abuse across the digital landscape is essential.
How did you get into brand protection?
My career reflects the theoretical trademark lifecycle. I started working with the first online search system using databases for research and brand protection content, encompassing legal, copyright, patent and trademark databases. My experience with the ‘first internet’ led me to study law; specifically how the digital world affects the bricks-and-mortar world, and how best to protect consumers and brands in the IP arena. The growth of any country’s economy, and consumer health, is directly tied to protecting brands and their genuine products. The final protection stage of brand lifecycles is, to me, a challenging background of online fraud and reputational threats, and revenue loss, as bad actors find creative methods to attack brand owners online. I feel very fortunate to be part of CSC’s Brand and Fraud team protecting valuable brands and trademarks.
My role as a Brand Protection Director mainly consists of developing the BP programme in the countries/brands that are under my responsibility. We become experts identifying our Products, but also by knowing our business, our customers and consumers very well, including working with key distributors and retailers in my region. We partner with external law firms and investigators to leverage their knowledge and act as our representatives in their specific areas and defend our brands and protect our consumers. We define with them objectives and deliverables for each project/case. Importantly we also conduct trainings to Law Enforcement, Customs, Judges and Prosecutors; identifying key organizations such as INTERPOL, WCO, OLAF for support. We are very active in local and global trade associations, which is an important part of our strategy for lobbying and influencing legislators and governments in the BP area. We protect our consumers online and offline seamlessly, continuously tracking online platforms offering suspicious products – which is critical as eBusiness continues to grow globally.
What are your top 2-3 best moments of 2021?
In Peru, we have been focussing on how to identify the source of a counterfeit Head & Shoulders Sachets; after several months of investigations, we executed more than 12 raids in wholesalers who were commercializing counterfeit products. More importantly, we shut down a clandestine factory producing counterfeit sachets, seizing raw materials, machinery and products ready to be marketed.
In Mexico, we have had several investigations for our Health brands specially in Guadalajara and Ciudad de Mexico, to identify the main source of counterfeit products being sold in Tianguis and informal Markets.
In Argentina, intelligence from Online sellers, led us to a series of offline investigations and after several months, 4 raids were executed and a significant amount of raw material seized.
What's the most rewarding part of your job / what is the thing that you've been most proud of in your anti-counterfeiting work?
To be recognized within my organization as:
A person who can handle inter-institutional situations across the Latin American countries and who has the correct connections throughout the region.
Becoming a true expert in complex counterfeit issues so that my assistance is sort across P&G as my business partners understand the value I can bring to their business.
Recognized as a key business partner, that understands and appreciates the urgency of the business to solve counterfeit issues and who has the skills to enable a string partnership to deploy solutions and take legal action in key cases.
A collaborator across peer companies for P&G issues to fight this fight.
How can we or our companies better educate consumers about the harms of counterfeiting and piracy?
The most important for brands is that we achieve the loyalty of our consumers. At P&G our purpose is:
To provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of consumers around the world, now and for generations to come.
Serving millions of consumers daily, it is our commitment to protect our brands from any offender and ensure all channels where consumers can buy our products online and offline offer genuine products – and where they do not we will investigate to identify the source of supply and take action.
How did you get into brand protection?
I started in P&G as a Sales manager in El Salvador and I had the opportunity to serve different channels, customers, and countries; I moved to Guatemala and then to Panama. I also was challenged to oversee the trade Manager´s team for Latin America and had the opportunity to meet and work with a lot of distributors across the region managing different businesses. Finally with all the experience of countries, brands and Distributor´s I was offered to start 8 years ago this new and amazing journey that was also a career move from Sales to Legal, for which I have no regrets and I hope I can continue to give my best in the years to come!
I handle the imposition of border injunctions and litigate counterfeit, unfair competition and criminal actions. On a daily basis, I am responsible of reviewing and analyzing the incoming alerts sent by Customs Officers regarding detected imported goods, informing our clients about these alleged infringing/non-authorized goods, and then, if the information is confirmed, setting up the appropriate legal strategy, executing it and making all the necessary arrangements to obtain a border measures imposition order as soon as possible.
What are your top 2-3 best moments of 2021?
1. After the imposition of border measures of around 80,000 allegedly infringing goods and the filing of an infringement action, we were contacted by the defendant´s counsel to settle the matter. A number of meetings and calls later, we were able to settle the case and destroy the infringing goods in a record time and in a more beneficial manner to our client.
2. We were able to finally destroy more than 250,000 infringing goods, after having obtained a favorable resolution and destruction order 3 years ago. This case was particularly challenging because the infringing goods were at a Customs’ official warehouse, who was trying to charge more than $100K USD as warehousing fees, but due to a special collaboration that we managed to arrange between the Mexican Trademark Office, Customs authorities, and different stakeholders, the goods were released without the payment of any fee.
Can you provide your top 2 best practices for protecting IP?
Register critical intellectual property assets as soon as possible and use them in a consistent manner. For this, having regular check-ins between product development, marketing, legal and brand protection teams would be essential and very beneficial for a structured brand protection plan.
Having a proactive brand protection team that can provide, on regular basis, workshops and education programs to Customs Officers to update them on brands´ products line and security locks, and to create a collaborative communication channel with them for Customs alerts.
What's the most rewarding part of your job / what is the thing that you've been most proud of in your anti-counterfeiting work?
For me, the most fulfilling part of my job in anti-counterfeiting is twofold: For one, a very gratifying part of all of this is the chance I get to protect and safeguard the health and safety of the consuming public, by contributing through my efforts in the global fight against counterfeits. And on the other hand, what I find pretty rewarding as well is the thrill of turning the legal and paperwork into tangible, exciting experiences when performing inspections to Customs office facilities, opening the containers, and being hands-on on discerning genuine from fake goods.
What’s your favorite famous or inspirational quote?
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. – Steve Jobs
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