IP protection is serious business, especially in the Internet world where who you know and what you know are sometimes all you have. This morning's session featured a panel of legal experts led by moderator Andrew Sherman of Katten Muchen & Zavis, who covered the in's and out's of trademarks, patents and other rights issues from a purely practical, business perspective.

Starting with trademarks and brands, Eric Fingerhut of Shaw Pittman explained their importance for marketing and customer relations. He covered the legal particulars, including their relationship to elements like urls, and made it clear that a brand is worth protecting because it is, "the sum of a company's marketing position and performance. It really is an emotional relationship between the customer and a manufacturer." That's why Harley-Davidson's vroom sound is trademarked, and so is the color pink in the world of building insulation. Both have developed unique mind share in their markets, and that mind share is protected by the owners.

Patents, which permit you to exclude others from making, using, or selling your inventions, are another form of intellectual property, one that has been changed and expanded by the Internet. Marc Kaufman of Sixbey Friedman Leedom & Ferguson explained how the federal government long rejected the idea of patenting a business model, but has relented in the face of the revolutionary change from the online world. Amazon.com, which has a patent on its "1-Click" ordering process, used that to their advantage by suing BarnesAndNoble.com which created a similar process. Will they win? That's still undecided, but Amazon did get an injunction which hamstrung a major competitor just before the holiday buying season.

Strong IP assets can help your marketing, and your funding search as well. "Venture capitalists love patents," said Kaufman. "Having a patent for significant subject matter, or even a patent pending application, can raise the confidence level of potential investors and facilitate obtaining capital. Every business plan should include a coherent strategy for protecting intellectual property including patent protection." Christopher Capuano, Senior VP and General Counsel of Internet solutions developer Proxicom, agreed, "When we were going public in 1999, one of the things the investment bankers focused on was our IP leverage. I was a little surprised at how much they hammered us on it, and how they turned around and valued it. They understood that we were able to protect and retain rights to a lot of what we did and could use that as leverage going forward. That really added to the bottom line in the value of the company."

You have to know when to pick your fights, however. When eToys got complaints from customers who inadvertently went to etoy, a site run by artists and sometimes included off-color content, it sued the site for trademark infringement. The protests which followed, including online "sit-ins" and boycotts by the old-guard and artistic communities, caused so much bad press that eToys is dropping the suit. Interestingly, although, etoy preceded eToys on the Net, eToys had already won an injunction against the artists, in part because eToys had been more aggressively using and marketing the name. Remember, at the end of the day, these are business decisions even more than they are legal ones.