© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Jeff Bounds
Contributing Writer for The Texas Lawbook
It’s been a whirlwind week for Sheldon R. Pontaoe. And it’s only Wednesday.
The head of trademarks and associate general counsel at the Fort Worth operation of eye-care products maker Alcon Laboratories Inc., Pontaoe was in back-to-back-to-back meetings largely connected to a Dallas convention of the International Trademark Association.
Known as the INTA for short, the New York-based trade group’s annual meeting, held at the Dallas Convention Center, brought with it more than 9,000 trademark owners, lawyers and academics from more than 140 countries.
Which meant a lot of trademark business was getting done. For Pontaoe, that meant getting together with friends and foes alike.
Alcon’s parent company, the Swiss-based health care products maker Novartis, brought in more than 15 trademark professionals from locales like Switzerland, Germany and New Jersey for the INTA festivities.
“It allows us the opportunity to meet with a lot of our outside counsel and vendors from all around the world in one location,” Pontaoe said. “It’s more cost effective, more convenient and more efficient.”
The festivities also afford attorneys like Pontaoe the chance to meet with counterparts in the industries that Alcon and Novartis play in.
“There are a lot of opportunities to discuss disputes or collaborations,” he said. “If you’re sitting next to each other, it’s different than if you’re on the phone or exchanging emails.”
Aside from company-specific matters, one frequent topic of discussion was counterfeiting.
“Billions of dollars get lost every year by companies because of counterfeit goods,” said Paul Reilly, a partner in the Dallas office of Baker Botts whose practice includes trademarks. “It’s a hot topic.”
By 2015, the value of fake goods worldwide could hit 1.26 trillion Euros (nearly $1.65 trillion), according to the INTA’s web site.
A difficulty, trademark attorneys concede, is getting the public to realize the problems inherent in purchasing fake goods.
“You go to a major city in the United States, you buy a knockoff,” said David Cho, Dallas-based general attorney, trademarks & copyrights, at AT&T Services Inc., a unit of telecom giant AT&T Inc. “People think buying one or two doesn’t hurt.”
But it does hurt, Cho said. And not just by weakening and diluting the brand of the company whose products are being copied. Knock-off goods can pose dangers to the public.
For instance, Cho tells the story of when he was in private practice and helped an automaker pursue a maker of counterfeit steering wheel covers.
The issue, he says, is those knock-off covers interfered with the automaker’s deployment mechanism for air bags. That meant the air bags wouldn’t work properly when they were needed.
Just as a company’s brand can suffer damage from copycat products, it can also be hurt by interlopers who try to use a business’ good name to trade in goods or services of their own.
Travelocity, the Southlake supplier of travel reservations services and technology, is embroiled in just such a situation, according to Robert McCutcheon, a partner at Dallas-based Munck Wilson Mandala, which is representing Travelocity in the matter.
“We had some third parties using the Travelocity [brand] to sell travel services,” McCutcheon said. “It leads to confusion in the marketplace.”
In addition to counterfeiting, a lot of the buzz at the event centered on managing and protecting trademarks and copyrights in the age of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
“Social media is a big concern for us and for our clients,” Reilly of Baker Botts said. “You have folks who are fans [of given brands], and you have folks who aren’t fans.”
In addition to providing a forum for critics, the Facebooks and Twitters of the world are also places where ne’er-do-wells can cause the same types of damage to brands that counterfeiters can create.
“There are people who use social media to trade off your brands and marks,” Reilly said. “Enforcing [the law] is important.”
Although much of the table talk at this week’s INTA event centered on enforcing laws and protecting brands, attendees also were focused on giving back to their communities.
Among other things, the INTA has recently been reaching out to non-profit organizations, many of which own trademarks and have “unique issues” in the field, and to small and mid-sized businesses, according to Cho, a former board member of the organization.
The organization has also been trying to get the word out to law students about the trademark field in an attempt to have a pipeline of practioners for the future, Cho said.
And the INTA has in the last few years offered projects through which members can donate their time to those who need legal services but can’t afford them. “It doesn’t have to be trademark related,” Cho said.
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