Yahoo 2008 Annual Report Download - page 19

and expand our user base. If we are unable to provide innovative search technologies and other services which
generate significant traffic to our Websites, our business could be harmed, causing our revenues to decline.
We rely on the value of our brands, and a failure to maintain or enhance the Yahoo! brands in a cost-effective
manner could harm our operating results.
We believe that maintaining and enhancing our brands, including those that contain the Yahoo! name as well as
those that do not, is an important aspect of our efforts to attract and expand our user, advertiser, and Affiliate base.
We also believe that the importance of brand recognition will increase due to the relatively low barriers to entry in
the Internet market. We have spent considerable money and resources to date on the establishment and maintenance
of our brands, and we anticipate spending increasing amounts of money on, and devoting greater resources to,
advertising, marketing, and other brand-building efforts to preserve and enhance consumer awareness of our brands.
Our brands may be negatively impacted by a number of factors, including among other issues: service outages;
product malfunctions; data privacy and security issues; exploitation of our trademarks by others without permission;
and poor presentation or integration of our search marketing listings by Affiliates on their sites or in their software
and services.
Further, while we attempt to ensure that the quality of our brand is maintained by our licensees, our licensees
might take actions that could impair the value of our brand, our proprietary rights, or the reputation of our
products and media properties. If we are unable to maintain or enhance customer awareness of, and trust in, our
brands in a cost-effective manner, or if we incur excessive expenses in these efforts, our business, operating
results and financial condition could be harmed.
Our intellectual property rights are valuable, and any failure or inability to sufficiently protect them could
harm our business and our operating results.
We create, own, and maintain a wide array of intellectual property assets, including copyrights, patents,
trademarks, trade dress, trade secrets, and rights to certain domain names, which we believe are among our most
valuable assets. We seek to protect our intellectual property assets through patent, copyright, trade secret,
trademark, and other laws of the U.S. and other countries of the world, and through contractual provisions.
However, the efforts we have taken to protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights might not be
sufficient or effective at stopping unauthorized use of those rights. Protection of the distinctive elements of
Yahoo! might not always be available under copyright law or trademark law, or we might not discover or
determine the full extent of any unauthorized use of our copyrights and trademarks in order to protect our rights.
In addition, effective trademark, patent, copyright, and trade secret protection might not be available or cost-
effective in every country in which our products and media properties are distributed or made available through
the Internet. Further, given the costs of obtaining patent protection, we might choose not to protect (or not to
protect in some jurisdictions) certain innovations that later turn out to be important. There is also a risk that the
scope of protection under our patents may not be sufficient in some cases or that existing patents may be deemed
invalid or unenforceable.
With respect to maintaining our trade secrets, we have entered into confidentiality agreements with most of our
employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with many of the parties with whom we conduct
business in order to limit access to and disclosure of our proprietary information. However, these agreements
might be breached and our trade secrets might be compromised by outside parties or by our employees, which
could cause us to lose any competitive advantage provided by maintaining our trade secrets.
If we are unable to protect our proprietary rights from unauthorized use, the value of our intellectual property
assets may be reduced. In addition, protecting our intellectual property and other proprietary rights is expensive
and time consuming. Any increase in the unauthorized use of our intellectual property could make it more
expensive to do business and consequently harm our operating results.
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