Trademarks, the Internet and people

Here’s a nice feature on my friend Ellen Shankman, the go-to gal for trademarks in Israel.  Two key quotes:

“The Internet has changed the landscape in ways that are impossible to overestimate,” she goes on. “E-commerce growth has fueled the rapid growth of counterfeit goods sales online. An estimated 50 percent of the drugs sold through the Internet are counterfeit.”

Another worrying trend, she tells ISRAEL21c, is the fact that “25 percent of teenagers say that their on-line friends are more important than their real friends.

I’m not sure that distinction is always valid — on-line friends can certainly be real friends, after all. But any INTA muckety-muck who actually cares about people and society, and keeps real-life issues like that at the forefront of her thinking alongside the potentially obsessive practice of law, is okay by me.