Having had a discussion with someone recently about trademarks it reminded me of a business idea I had had a couple of years ago. At the time it was unfortunate that I came about thinking of this as I had just had to pay a not inconsequential fee to a large company’s lawyers for infringing their trademark.

I won’t go in to the details, but one of my web sites that was an e-commerce site mentioned one of their trademarks in the keywords of the meta tags and the product description of a very similar product to theirs. At the time I didn’t know it was a trademark so was most surprised to have a heavy-handed letter from some big-shot firm of lawyers.

Anyway, the idea I had was that you could subscribe to a service that had access to the database of patents and then crawled your web site periodically searching for trademarks and highlighting this to the web site owner when it found any. Then the site owner can choose to remove or leave them (as the trademark might be for a different class of products).

To monetise this you would simply charge a subscription for the search based on the number of pages and how often you wanted the search to happen. You could also team up with a lawyer and pass leads on to them for people wanting advice and get a kick-back.

To promote this, you could easily get lots of PR in the business and legal press about it. In fact you could offer a reseller package to lawyers for them to sell to their customers. Also you can get people to try it by either searching a single page or doing the full search one time, but only showing the summary of the results.

Nice little earner that once configured with the technology in place would run itself.