From Nation’s Restaurant News: Restaurants Fight "Brandjacking" Threat Online

Just as the restaurant industry found during the tech boom of the late 1990s, the Internet continues to bring as much peril as it does promise.
While the current growth of social media has provided companies large and small with cheap, effective marketing, it also has exposed them to a new kind of fraud: “brandjacking.”
A company can be brandjacked if a scammer—or in some cases, a competitor—creates a false social-media profile on outlets such as Facebook and Twitter and misrepresents that company online, said Susan Neuberger Weller, a trademark attorney with the Washington, D.C., office of Mintz Levin.
In response to this new threat, many restaurant concepts have gotten tough with “brandjackers,” including seeking redress from the courts.

Read more: http://www.nrn.com/article.aspx?id=372754#ixzz0R5OzH6Rt

About Christian Stegmaier
Senior Shareholder

Christian Stegmaier is a shareholder and chair of the Retail & Hospitality Practice Group at Collins & Lacy in Columbia. He is also active in the firm’s professional liability and appellate practices. Stegmaier welcomes your questions at (803) 255-0454 or cstegmaier@collinsandlacy.com.