Aardvark

Inspiration

Aardvark seeks to empower trademark and copyright holders by finding unauthorized uses of your intellectual property for sale and holding those responsible accountable for damages. It's very difficult to police the web for this - but rest assured, Aardvark does all of the heavy lifting!

What it does

Aardvark combines artificial intelligence, web crawling, and the Dropbox Sign API into a small but powerful app. Here's how it works:

1) You provide the app with your trademark and choose from a list of common culprit websites to search. The app crawls the web to grab these products and their links.

2) A list of offending products (links/titles) featuring your trademark is compiled into a spreadsheet.

3) Using OpenAI's API, a legal claim letter is generated on your behalf.

4) Using Dropbox Sign API, you sign the letter to attest that you are the rightful owner of the trademark.

5) Aardvark emails this letter along with the list of pages where the infringing products are located to the legal department of the respective website.

6) With threat of legal action, your products are removed.

How we built it

Aardvark was written in PHP. It uses several libraries such as FPDF to generate PDF files. It also uses an intelligent SERP API to search Google for results on targeted websites. OpenAI's artificial intelligence API (GPT 3.5) is used to generate a legal claim letter (cease and desist letter).

Finally, Dropbox Sign API helps to add your signature to the document which is then emailed to the legal department using PHPMailer.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenging aspect for this project was formulating an idea that wouldn't be obvious. I wanted my submission to hopefully stand out from the crowd and not simply be a tool that uses AI to analyze documents, but rather offer a custom, targeted solution that could carve its own niche.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Aardvark is a functioning prototype that could pave the way for a full scale business idea. It's often very time consuming to police the Internet to find places where your IP is being placed on products to sell without your permission. Aardvark simply saves massive amounts of time and uses responsible AI to get the job done.

What we learned

I learned how to implement Dropbox Sign API, which I originally thought was going to be much more difficult to use. It turns out that it is much easier than I imagined. I'm also appreciative that Dropbox provides a PHP specific SDK and code samples -- this all helped immensely.

What's next for Aardvark

I'd like to explore this tool further by implementing search capabilities for other websites such as Etsy or Ebay and use AI to determine if a product is truly being sold in an unauthorized way.

Prototype Available

Please check out and try the app out for yourself here: https://contrabandinteractive.com/aardvark/

Built With

• openai
• php