News

TomTom satisfied with pirate tracing.

by Jouke Schaafsma

AMSTERDAM, Wednesday

With only a month’s operation an automatic learning search engine, developed by Dutch whiz kids to prevent piracy on the internet, has managed to track down 3000 sellers of illegal TomTom maps and has removed them from eBay.

TomTom, a listed company, has now brought BrandCleaner into action in order to target local auctions over the world.

Their successful digital approach to stopping piracy on the internet has attracted the attention of an international clothing store and several law firms who also would like to use BrandCleaner to search online auctions for them.

The search engine has been operating for two months now and the number of counterfeit products is going down quickly, causing TomTom to be extremely enthusiastic about the method that is being used.

‘Illegal software is a gigantic problem and causes a serious loss of sales worldwide. BrandCleaner helps us to strike a heavy blow to illegal trade’, says Darrell Haining, who is responsible for dealing with counterfeiting and piracy at TomTom.

Besides eBay, TomTom is also going to use BrandCleaner’s weapon on Dutch website Marktplaats.nl and its South-American counterpart MercadoLivre. Company Director Jann Tosatto from BrandCleaner is confident that it is difficult to fool the system: ‘Maybe someone can fool it once or twice, but after that the programme recognizes their language. Simply copying the texts of genuine sellers will also not work, because the programme will remember their profile. And in the end, there is always human review before an auction is deleted.’

Klik hier voor de Nederlandse tekst zoals deze verschenen is in de Telegraaf van 2 juli 2008.

BrandCleaner launches a brand new website.

BrandCleaner launches a beta version of AuctionManager.