Marksmen, Inc.

Type:	Private
Industry:	Intellectual Property Brand Protection
Founded:	1998
Founder(s):	Ken Taylor Jason Tirado Mark Doerr
Headquarters:	111 N Maryland Avenue Suite 201 Glendale, CA
Country:	USA
Website:	www.marksmen.com
Blog:	Namesmash
Facebook:	Marksmen
LinkedIn:	Marksmen
Twitter:	@marksmentweets
Key People
Jeff Crapo, Chairman and CEO Matt Wichser, CFO Ken Taylor, Founder

Marksmen, Inc. (commonly called Marksmen) is a global firm that provides services including intellectual property acquisition, consulting and investigation. Its headquarters are in Glendale, CA with offices in Carrboro, NC; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA and London, England.The company specializes in intellectual property purchases/sales, brand protection, online/in-person investigation, product/service intelligence and solving complex intellectual property issues for companies the world over, under strict confidentiality.

The company was founded in a one-bedroom apartment in Pasadena by Ken Taylor, Jason Tirado and Mark Doerr in 1998 and has since grown to 4 US offices, offices in London and Hong Kong, and a network that spans the globe, completing more than 70,000 investigations and over 14,000 acquisitions. Marksmen’s clients range from Fortune 75 companies to farming collectives and are located across the globe.

History

In May 2002, Verisign, Inc. entered an agreement to deliver Marksmen’s Internet domain name and trademark recovery services as part of the VeriSign Digital Brand Management Services portfolio.

In September 2009, Marksmen partnered with Thomson Compumark to add trademark in-use investigations to Thomson’s own comprehensive availability search.

On December 13, 2010, Account Manager Paul Allen represented Marksmen placing third in the first annual The Patently Impossible Project, a charity event held at the Miami Science Museum by the Intellectual Property Committee of the Dade County Bar Association to benefit The Legal Aid Society. Contestants were handed a brown bag containing the pieces, parts and tools they would need to assemble a patented invention The Toy Catapult (US Design Patent No. D366,908) and then successfully launch a penny about 10 feet across a marked line.

In March 2011, Marksmen entered into a domain name co-brokering agreement with Moniker & SnapNames.

On May 1, 2015 Marksmen and Com Laude unveiled their joint venture, MCL Domains, a corporate domain name management Service.

Products and Services

Investigations

Marksmen employs licensed private investigators & affiliates worldwide for trademark investigations (first use, scope of use, infringement, abandonment, goods/services offered, etc.), litigation support, test purchases and on-site inspections; patent investigations (business methods/processes, product samples/ literature, locating inventors/experts/ex-employees, etc.); provides enforcement support (counterfeiting, gray market goods and back channel sales). Marksmen’s Investigations group was named as one of Twitter’s ‘Top 100 Investigators On Twitter’ for 2014.

Acquisition/Sales

Marksmen’s analysts negotiate the anonymous purchase/recovery of intellectual property rights (copyrights, domain names, trademarks, apps, images, logos, patents, social media, taglines, vanity phone numbers, etc.), broker select premium domains, offer payment/transfer support for asset recovery and provide domain name valuations. Although most transactions are confidential, Marksmen is known to have completed some of the top transactions in the industry.

eBeagle

Detailed brand monitoring report which Marksmen delivers after a thorough analysis of the results of an intense customized crawl of the searchable internet, free of the typical false positives, redundancies and hits outside of set parameters.

MCL Domains

A joint venture between Marksmen, Inc. & Com Laude USA, MCL Domains is a corporate domain portfolio management company offering domain registrations, renewals, assignments and website hosting via a state-of-the-art domain management portal. MCL domains is certified for both ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 for system security and quality management. The registrar supports all TLDs, including existing gTLDs, ccTLDs and every new gTLD.

Name Quiver

Marksmen’s domain name brokering service, Name Quiver leverages connections in both the corporate and domaining worlds to privately broker premium domain names or domain portfolios. Marksmen partnered w/ Moniker auctions to complete the top domain transaction of 2011 selling Social.com for $2,600,000.

Corporate Structure

Board of Directors

As of January 1, 2016, the board of directors include:

• Jeff Crapo, Chairman and CEO
• Ken Taylor, Founder and former CEO, continues to support the company and heads business development of MCL Domains, a new corporate domain management venture with Com Laude. Mr. Taylor has published articles on IP investigations, is a frequent speaker and is a member and has served on various committees of the Intellectual Property Constituency of ICANN, Computer Law Association, Intellectual Property Owners Association, International Trademark Association, Marques, International Anti-Counterfeiting Association, Triangle Intellectual Property Law Association and the California Association of Licensed Investigators (he’s licensed both in California and North Carolina).

Management

As of January 1,2016, the management team includes:

• Jeff Crapo, CEO
• Matt Wichser, CFO
• Ken Taylor

Industry Leadership

• Rudy Gaines:Chair, ICANN Leadership Development Committee
  

 Chair, INTA Public and Media Relations Committee

• Ken Taylor: Co-chair, INTA Bulletin Association News Subcommittee (former)

  Member, Membership Committee (former)

  Member, INTA Internet Committee (former, twice)

Business Memberships

• International Trademark Association (INTA)
• Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
• MARQUES
• Pharmarceutical Trade Marks Group
• World Association of Detectives

References

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International Standards Organization

International Trademark Association