Small Business Fights to Survive by Protecting Its Copyrights

Our family business is a manufacturer of niche products in the western horse tack industry. Our unique product designs have been the repeated target of counterfeiters both in the U.S. and Europe over the past five years. Over time we have learned how to successfully counter these unauthorized efforts to copy our designs and piggyback on our well-known brand name. The popularity of our products makes us a tempting target for the competition and we find ourselves in a state of perpetual siege.
Copyright law in the United States is a bit peculiar. Once an original work is published, whether that is over the Internet or in print format, it is considered to have a copyright. However, until the copyright is registered with the U.S Copyright Office in Washington, D.C., one's options to take legal action against the infringing party are quite limited. Registering a copyright, however, allows you to legally challenge the company that stole your designs with the threat of significant monetary punitive damages if the case would go to trial. That's exactly what we have done in several instances of blatant copyright infringement and it works.
In our industry the unauthorized copying of the designs of saddle blankets, spurs, bits and other horse tack is something that is commonplace and never challenged. The first time our designs were copied by another company in Texas and made into a rather poor quality product made in India, we hired a copyright attorney and challenged the design thieves.
They were outraged that we would dare claim the designs as our own and tried to bluster and threaten their way out of the claim. Eventually, because our copyrights were not registered, we were only able to stop the offending company from copying any more of our designs. We were not able to force them to remove the ones they had already usurped.
The next two instances of copyright theft were different. By then we had gone to the trouble of registering the copyrights on our new designs and we had a hammer with which to challenge the infringer. This changed the picture completely. We were able not only to stop the copying and force the company to take the unauthorized copies off the market, but also receive significant payment for damages.
The latest, most blatant attempt to trade on our brand name occurred in Europe oddly enough. An Austrian company purchased some product from us to establish themselves as a dealer. Subsequently they found a source for inexpensive copies of our product and began to advertise them as genuine using our brand name. That took a lot of gall, we thought. An email threatening legal action through a Vienna-based attorney and the promise to publicize their fraudulent claims on our website put an end to that attempt.
If these companies would only spend the same amount of energy and money creating their own original designs as they do trying to copy ours, everyone would be better off. Until then we will continue to counter these illegal attempts to steal our designs.
The author is a former U.S. diplomat, international businessman, rancher and avid sportsman. He lives in both Texas and Nicaragua having recently finished a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean in San Juan del Sur.