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Incopro: Enabling rights owners to ‘redress the imbalance’
Simon Baggs, CEO of Incopro, discusses the success of the group’s technology-led strategy and considers the key dynamics of the evolving brand protection world
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Having over 25 years of experience as a litigator, Simon
Baggs takes on dual roles as a partner at Wiggin and as the CEO and co-founder
of online brand and IP protection company Incopro.
The group, which recently presented the Europe In-House Team of the Year award at Managing IP’s EMEA
Awards 2021, looks to create a world where consumers can trust every online
interaction with a brand.
The idea for Incopro emerged over a coffee in London between
Baggs and Bret Boivin, who now serves as the group’s chief technical officer.
They realised the ‘bad guys’ were winning the battle online and were passionate
about making the internet a better place for businesses and their consumers.
“Rights owners need proactive enforcement, better technology
for tracking purposes and for platforms to be put on notice much faster,” Baggs
tells Managing IP. “We have enabled rights owners to redress the imbalance.”
The growth of the internet
Baggs read history and politics for his bachelor’s degree at Leicester University and then completed a conversion course to pursue a career as a lawyer. He trained at Regent Street-based Hamlin Slowe, and spent two years at Schilling & Lom and Partners in the late 1990s, before joining Wiggin’s litigation team as a partner in 2000.
“I started off with an interest in entertainment law, representing
music artists and companies. Some of the early cases that I worked on involved
the likes of the Spice Girls and Stock Aitken Waterman,” says Baggs.
“As the internet began to grow in the late 1990s, I started
to get more enquiries from the entertainment industry about protecting IP
online. Gradually, the market’s interest, as well as the cases that I worked
on, began to take on a greater IP focus.”
In response to the rising demand, Baggs created a
four-person IP team at Wiggin, which has since expanded to over 30 professionals.
The firm has also recently hired a team in Brussels to assist clients in
dealing with legal complications arising from Brexit.
Watershed moments
Next year, Incopro will celebrate a decade since its
incorporation.
Baggs highlights two specific cases that he has worked on as
the ‘watershed moments’ that have shaped Incopro’s purpose and mission. A
newspaper cut-out about the first case adorns the wall of his office at home.
“The Newzbin case
led to the creation of Incopro,” says Baggs. ”The judgment paved the way for
piracy websites to be blocked by internet service providers, and we felt there
was a need for technology to do more to support clients in tackling the growing
global issue of online IP infringement.”
Work on Incopro’s content protection technology started
thereafter, and by the end of 2012, the group launched and licensed its first
product. In the early days, the group specialised in assisting film and music
companies developing evidence for site blockings with the help of a
comprehensive database.
The second breakthrough – the Cartier case – saw Incopro give evidence to establish that internet
service providers could block websites infringing trademarks. Subsequently, a
leading luxury group partnered with Incopro to build technology to prioritise
which web locations to tackle.
“This second case helped us enter the world of brand
protection and build technology to tackle brand infringement,” says Baggs.
Soon after, Incopro launched Talisman, its brand protection platform, which aims to find, prioritise and
eliminate brand infringement online.
New wave of threats
Baggs notes that
potential threats are multiplying and charading through new forms to reflect
the technology of today, meaning that the importance of brand protection for
companies continues to soar. This involves innovative alternatives to classic
counterfeit scenarios, as well as next-gen threats such as social media
impersonation and deepfakes.
“A lot more is
happening on social media. Feeds are becoming increasingly difficult to
interpret. How do you know if what you are looking at is the real thing?” Baggs
asks.
He compares the evolving
phenomenon to an early memory of IP infringement that he spotted on his travels
in Thailand during the late 1980s.
“When looking at
cheap watches on side streets, sellers would claim that the counterfeit goods
would cost just $20, rather than the expected market value of $10,000,” says
Baggs.
“This still happens
– but these days it is more confusing. A Facebook advert may present something
that is not far off the original price. The said fake $20 watch would instead
be pitched at $4,000 – and would be promoted as ‘50% off’ or as ‘stock clearance’.
There are many people out there who would struggle to find out what would be a
legitimate use of the brand and what is not.”
“Consumers have a mind-set
where they feel actions would be stopped if they were not lawful.”
Studying market trends
Baggs suggests that
the number of places where harm occurs will amplify over time and that there
would be significant dispersals to more direct platforms such as Instagram and
TikTok with the rise of ‘influencers’. Hence, there is a greater need for brands
to ensure that consumers are getting the right experience.
Accordingly,
Incopro’s strategy is technology-led.
“Incopro has a large
engineering team and continually invests in research and development to keep up
with market changes and trends. There is little use in just being efficient at
solving problems which were at the forefront a few years ago,” says Baggs.
He recalls how
counterfeiters attempted to evade being tracked by leaving out the names of
brands from online descriptions, and by instead placing them on images to avoid
detection from IP protection software. Technology has since been created to
stamp out such illicit practices.
Transforming the industry
Baggs looks at
Incopro’s growth over the past decade with pride. En route their journey, his
team has routinely been recognised for innovation and technological excellence
by trade publications including Managing
IP, Modern Law and The Financial Times.
“I wanted to achieve a scaled solution,” says Baggs. “On the
one hand, it was nice to see cases like Newzbin
and Cartier being won. However, each
of one of these cases was costing a lot of money and taking a lot of time – and
the problem was considerably wider. It was simply not possible to litigate all
the time.”
“We are proud to
have secured some big successes,” he adds. “In some instances, we have gone
from the stage of every other result of a brand on a Google search being fake,
to having the first 20 pages produce genuine results.”
“Keeping the
internet clean is where we have been so successful. It needs to be somewhere
that products can be sold without distractions from fakes and frauds.”
Baggs is pleased
with how clients’ expectations have evolved with time, to focus on outcomes
rather than individual tasks.
“Customers
increasingly want to see a reduction in problems, not just records of the
number of removals.”
He reveals that as threats
have become more complex, some of the main platforms have also reacted with
better protection initiatives and have shown a willingness to work with groups
like Incopro. Moreover, the arrival of legislative and regulatory
reform through the SHOP SAFE
Act in the US and the Digital Services Act in the EU are likely to improve
enforcement.
“The internet infrastructure is quite heavily tilted in
favour of the platforms – be it internet service providers, internet
marketplaces or Google. Historically, rights owners have struggled to protect
themselves online,” says Baggs. “There
are a lot of platforms out there who still have to catch-up when it comes to
supporting brands – but I do think we are seeing a shift.”
“It is also important to remember that the reach of certain platforms vary across the globe. For example in Russia, VKontakte is the equivalent of Facebook for the market. Likewise, MercadoLibre is a very important platform in South America.”
Responding to the pandemic
Incopro has grown
during the COVID-19 pandemic. The group have protected more customers and
employed more staff, despite the day-to-day challenges of remote working.
“There has been a
huge acceleration in the use of online platforms to buy goods and services,” explains
Baggs.
“The level of
interaction was headed this way – but we have perhaps seen five years’ worth of
change in less than a year.”
Some of the work
completed by Incopro has assisted health authorities in the fight against the
pandemic. The group has supported companies that make consumer products such as
masks and medication deal with matters including counterfeits and price
gouging, which began to appear as early as March 2020.
“Protecting the
brands and protecting consumers is something we are really proud of,” says
Baggs.
Having started out
as a team of four, situated in a small room within Wiggin’s London offices,
there are now branches in Cardiff, Idaho and Shanghai.
“We have a vibrant,
multicultural workforce at Incopro,” says Baggs. “It is encouraging to track
our strong performance on promoting equal opportunities and cultural
diversity.”
“When dealing with
the internet, it helps if you are able to employ individuals who originate from
different countries and speak different languages. You want to employ people
who can understand a wide spectrum of the internet and how brands use it.”
The approach from Baggs
and Incopro towards brand protection seems to have struck the right balance, as
companies seek to navigate the transforming industry.
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