At Pine Tree Legal Assistance we are great believers in the first amendment and the free exchange of ideas and information. We encourage people to copy, re-use and redistribute in the low-income community the self-help material on our website. It troubles us to have to even claim intellectual property rights in our stuff, let alone enforce it.

Nevertheless when people use our name or our work to mislead our vulnerable client population it raises our sense of outrage.

At Pine Tree we're proud of the original art work on the banners for our home page and secondary pages. It makes us distinct and gives character to our website.

This is the entry page for the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic part of our website:

Here is the ad for a "Tax Clinic" we found this week:

For only $50 you can get $100 of value from the Tax Clinic.

Our pro bono IP counsel are developing quite an expertise in protecting Pine Tree's intellectual property. Hopefully this won't take much effort.

NTAP is doing some great work in raising these issues in the legal aid community and in helping organizations to protect their rights, and more importantly, protect their clients from being misled. Check out the CyberPiracy section of the LSTech Resource Center or review some of the CyberPiracy trainings. Take advantage of some of the pro bono assistance that is being offered to help organizations with trademark and copyright registration.