You Don’t Know Jack was a popular game and trivia quiz show during the 1990s. You Don’t Know Quack is part of a new ad campaign for the Aflac Insurance company. Jellyvision, the makers of You Don’t Know Jack, are not very happy with this new ad campaign and are suing Aflac claiming trademark infringement. Kotaku has some details on the lawsuit:

The suit, filed on January 21 in United States District Court for the Norther District of Illinois, alleges that Aflac’s You Don’t Know Quack marketing campaign and corresponding webgame infringe on Jellyvision’s long-held trademark for You Don’t Know Jack.

Jellvision Inc.’s suit claims that the logo for Aflac’s web-game and the style of the game itself — a series of questions — are similar enough to You Don’t Know Jack’s to compel legal action.

The company is seeking monetary damages and a court order to stop Aflac from obtaining a trademark for You Don’t Know Quack.

Now that we have discussed how a company can protect their content during development we should look at the next logical part of protecting one’s products: content protection during production.

The first step is ensuring that you know your manufacturers and can trust their own internal security measures. Most product leaks occur because someone at a replication facility made a copy of the product and spread it via the internet. Do not be afraid to investigate and ask questions before outsourcing. One solution to the risks of outsourcing is to keep as much production possible done internally. For every link in the chain you add (in terms of outside production) you increase the risk of your products being pirated and you not being able to track down the potential source and limit damage.

This leads us to the second step: tracking your products during production. If you have to outsource your production (and even if you handle your production internally) you should be able to track who is doing what during the production phase and when they are doing it. While people can gain access to a console or a locked drawer, the logging of products can help reduce the risk by simply making it harder for people and increasing the likelihood that they will be caught. New products are being developed that allow for a digital watermark that is unseen to the human eye and for low costs too, which makes tracking people even easier. In short making sure you know and trust your manufacturers and keeping track of your products during production are two key steps to preventing piracy of your company’s products.

Today we examine one of the various ways that content producers can protect themselves during the content production stage from piracy.

One key component is that only a limited number of employees should have access to the products in development. This should not aim to limit collaborative design work; instead it should ensure that only the people needed on the project are involved in the development chain. Too often leaks occur because someone outside the necessary development chain spreads the products to unauthorized users. This occurred during the development of Doom 3 when a non ID Software employee at a graphics card company pirated a pre-release version of the game. The game which had been worked under a fairly large veil of secrecy now became available for both consumers and competitors to try out. The key lesson is to ensure that your internal team is kept to a minimum needed for development and innovation, but also remains manageable. A manageable team helps make content easier to keep track of and protect from being stolen or leaked. Accidental leaks have led to the pirating of many products. A recent example was the downloadable content for the game Dragon Age Origins entitled “Return to Ostagar” was accidentally left on a file server accessible to the public. This led to the product being pirated while the retail version was still being tested (because of a last second software bug that was discovered) and the loss of a large amount of potential revenue. Harsh lessons such as the two examples above demonstrate the need for smaller more manageable teams in content production, balanced with the design and innovation needs