VISUA Unveils Infringio: The AI-Powered Shield Against Copyright and Trademark Lawsuits

Dublin and New York-based VISUA Leverages its market-leading Visual-AI technology suite within Infringio, to scan images for copyright and trademark infringements. Helping print businesses of all sizes to safeguard against legal risks.

Leading Visual-AI company, VISUA has launched a revolutionary new product called ‘Infringio’. Aimed at companies of all sizes in the print industry, Infringio leverages VISUA’s market-leading Visual-AI (Computer Vision) technology to identify infringements submitted by their users before they go to print, thereby avoiding costly lawsuits.

The print-on-demand industry has flourished in recent years thanks to the emergence of sophisticated digital printing technologies, which allow cost-effective short-run and even one-off printing onto a diverse range of products, from the ubiquitous t-shirts and other apparel, to mugs, phone cases, and essentially anything else you can think of. This has allowed independent artists, brands and rights holders to create income streams from the sale of merchandise through print-on-demand marketplaces like GearLaunch, RedBubble and Printify. But a side-effect of these capabilities is that more unscrupulous sellers use these platforms to hawk essentially counterfeit products that steal the logos, images and protected taglines of brands, artists and other rights holders to sell products.

This is a major challenge for print-on-demand companies where the receipt of these images and subsequent printing of them is fully automated. This requires trust and safety teams to review every image and determine if it constitutes an infringement and should be blocked. The number of images to review can number from the hundreds per day, for very small companies, into the thousands for larger platforms. The costs of monitoring this are simply too high to be viable.

It’s also a challenge for rights holders, who have to identify infringements and then create take-down notices for every individual infringement. If the print company doesn’t comply or the damage is already too great, they then have the arduous challenge of mounting a lawsuit for compensation. 

These challenges have led to a number of high-profile cases in recent years. In 2018 Harley Davidson won the largest case in the history of the sector after it was awarded $19.2 million in damages against Sunfrog.

Even colleges and universities are working to protect their IP as shown by a case in November 2024, where Penn State University was awarded $28,000 in damages against Vintage Brand, when the jury deemed it had infringed on Penn State University’s trademarks by selling products with the university’s seal and lion designs.

While accurate data around the number of trademark and copyright related lawsuits each year is scarce, there are indications that this is a growing trend. According to Patent PC, in 2020 there were 11,941 trademark infringement lawsuits filed in the United States. Meanwhile in 2022, the TTAB (Trademark Trial and Appeal Board) saw 7,634 new cases filed, and in 2023, the TTAB completed 8,512 decisions on trademark disputes.

These numbers mask the true scale of the issue because approximately 60% of trademark cases in the U.S. are resolved before reaching trial, through negotiations, preliminary injunctions, or alternative dispute resolution methods.

What is clear is that this trend of challenging print companies and launching legal cases against them is growing, along with the cumulative size of the damages being awarded each year.

The growth of AI, and in particular Computer Vision, has allowed larger print marketplaces to begin addressing this issue, but these systems have traditionally required significant investment in both money, resources, and time, with often less than perfect outcomes.

According to research on the adoption and engagement in AI systems by PPAI (Promotional Products Association International), 92% of PPAI 100 suppliers and 87% of PPAI 100 distributors are engaging with AI in their business operations. However, the majority of PPAI 100 suppliers (69%) and PPAI 100 distributors (65%) reported that a lack of internal expertise is their most significant barrier to AI adoption.

As Raul Rodriguez, CEO of Merch.ai, put it:

“There needs to be more AI tools built that are specific for the industry, easy to use, with not much training required and actually efficient.”

Infringio – Meeting the needs of Print-On-Demand companies and Rights Holders alike

Infringio meets this need by providing cutting-edge technology in a simple-to-use platform aimed squarely at print companies and marketplaces. Infringio achieves this through the following innovations:

• The largest ready-to-go library of brands, characters, images and text in the world, consisting of over 100,000 brands alone.
• A curated-for-you, constantly updated library service, so new film, music, TV, product, and artist imagery will be added, negating the need for print companies to undertake this mammoth task.
• The ability for print companies and rights holders to add unique or specific logos and images to the library as desired.
• API-based, low-code and no-code implementations allow companies of any size and any usage needs to protect themselves with Infringio, no matter the size, or lack, of a technical implementation team.
• Companies don’t need to learn or engage with the technology behind Infringio. They simply provide the images to be reviewed and Infringio delivers results, in minutes, showing which ones contain infringing elements.
• Infringio provides automation based on rules and parameters provided by each client, so orders can be automatically blocked or released, significantly reducing overheads within trust and safety teams.

VISUA, co-founder and CTO, Alessandro Prest explains:

“Infringio leverages our proven Computer Vision technologies and advanced generative AI, allowing us to deliver reliable results at massive scale within minutes.”

Luca Boschin, VISUA, co-founder and CEO, adds:

“In the old Napster era, few people in the movie and music industries believed that online/streaming revenues would one day eclipse those of physical media. It simply needed the industry to leverage the technologies that allowed consumers to embrace legitimate download and streaming services.

“Infringio represents a similar watershed moment for the print industry and opens a new chapter for VISUA. We can now engage with print-on-demand marketplaces, print solutions providers, and rights holders to realise this new secure paradigm for the print industry. We are market leaders in the delivery of Visual-AI solutions for Brand monitoring, sports sponsorship monitoring, counterfeit detection, and phishing detection. We can now do the same in the print sector.”

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About VISUA
VISUA boasts best-in-class Visual-AI that powers the world’s leading brand and sponsorship monitoring, brand protection, and authentication platforms. VISUA delivers technologies such as logo/mark detection, text detection, object & scene detection and visual search, that are used by world leading companies for applications as varied as sports sponsorship monitoring, social listening, and phishing detection, to holographic authentication and counterfeit product detection. Its Visual-AI technology is proven to deliver the highest precision with instant learning, at unlimited scale, and is adaptable for any use case. VISUA believes in People-First AI, they see a world where Visual-AI will lift humanity out of the mundane, empowering a society that focuses more on creativity and collaboration and less on binary tasks, and empowering services and solutions that humans alone simply can’t deliver.

For media inquiries please contact:

Franco De Bonis
Marketing Director 
VISUA
[email protected]