I read somewhere that the Better Business Bureau was suing a few companies for using the BBB logo on their web sites without the permission of the BBB. If my companies logo was used by someone else I would have know idea how to go about checking this unless I knew the name of the company. How do you think that they found out about this? There is really no way to discover this (sadly) without actually knowing the name of the company and I wonder what may have prompted the BBB check on this. I hope you understand what I am asking. Thanks for your input!

All Answers To Questions

That website was found because it was actually doing some shady stuff, pretending to be associated with the better business bureau or something like that. They received complaints about it and that is how they found out about it. To answer your first question, it makes it easier to happen upon the company, again it's hard to find if your logo is being used if you don't know the company name, but it is far easier than happening upon it in a magazine, newspaper, tv, etc.

There are a lot of ways. Firstly, someone could have notified them (maybe from inside the company). the Internet would just make it easier to do that -- although it happened before the Internet as well. Secondly, they could do an image search. Once they found their own image, they could see if the site has permission to show it.

It's easier to search for specific copyrighted text used on websites. It actually take only seconds. The internet is very efficient in this matter. Legal departments at companies use the internet for this purpose all the time! YouTube is constantly in contact with legal departments about users posing copyrighted material. It is then reported and taken down. That's only one example though.