European dot-coms guilty of neglect

NEWS Landwell, PWC's legal division, surveyed 100 pure-play dot-coms in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK and found that almost a third had not bothered to register their trademarks in their own countries and more than half had failed to register them abroad. Simon Walker, head of the ebusiness unit at Landwell, said: "This isn't the usual case of lawyers saying 'don't do that or you'll get sued', it's a case of people failing to capture and control the unique value of their business and build on it." "Pure dot-coms, B2B or B2C, don't have bricks to show as assets so they have to build on their brand name - very useful when you're going for that second round of funding." The report shows that 40 per cent of companies had not bothered to register their domain names in any other territory despite the fact that well over half of them were getting response from 10 countries or more.