Go Daddy 2015 Annual Report Download - page 146

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how we would be affected. Laws and regulations in the United States or in foreign jurisdictions may be applied in new or different
manners in pending or future litigation. Further, other existing bodies of law, including the criminal laws of various jurisdictions,
may be deemed to apply to our activities, or new statutes or regulations may be adopted in the future.
Intellectual Property and Proprietary Rights
Our intellectual property and proprietary rights are important to our business. We rely on a combination of trademark,
patent, copyright and trade secret laws, confidentiality and access-related procedures and safeguards and contractual provisions to
protect our proprietary technologies, confidential information, brands and other intellectual property.
We have also developed, acquired or licensed proprietary technologies for use in our business. As of December 31, 2015 we
had 164 issued patents in the United States covering various aspects of our product offerings. Additionally, as of December 31,
2015, we had 211 pending U.S. patent applications and intend to file additional patent applications in the future.
We have non-disclosure, confidentiality and license agreements with employees, contractors, customers and other third
parties, which limit access to and use of our proprietary information. Though we rely in part upon these legal and contractual
protections, as well as various procedural safeguards, we believe the skill and ingenuity of our employees, the functionality and
frequent enhancements to our solutions and our ability to introduce new products and features meeting the needs of our customers
are more important to maintaining our competitive position in the marketplace.
We have an ongoing trademark and service mark registration program pursuant to which we register our brand names and
product names, taglines and logos in the United States and other countries to the extent we determine appropriate and cost-
effective. We also have common law rights in some unregistered trademarks that were established over years of use. In addition,
we have a trademark and service mark enforcement program pursuant to which we monitor applications filed by third parties to
register trademarks and service marks that may be confusingly similar to ours, as well as the use of our major brand names in
social media, domain names and other Internet sites.
Despite our efforts to preserve and protect our intellectual property, unauthorized third parties may attempt to copy, reverse
engineer or otherwise obtain access to our proprietary rights, and competitors may attempt to develop solutions that could
compete with us in the markets we serve. Unauthorized disclosure of our confidential information or proprietary technologies by
our employees or third parties could also occur. The risk of unauthorized use of our proprietary and intellectual property rights
may increase as we continue to expand outside of the United States.
Third-party infringement claims are also possible in our industry, especially as functionality and features expand, evolve and
overlap across industries. Third parties, including non-practicing patent holders, have from time to time claimed, and could claim
in the future, that our processes, technologies or websites infringe patents they now hold or might obtain or be issued in the future.
Employees
As of December 31, 2015, we had 4,761 employees worldwide, including 3,243 in our Customer Care team, 811 in
technology and development, 132 in marketing and advertising and 575 in general and administrative. Excluded from our
employee figures are more than 600 Customer Care specialists located in India and Belfast, Ireland who are directly employed by
third-party partners, but who are devoted to GoDaddy on a full time basis. Substantially all of our employees are based in the
United States. None of our employees is represented by a labor union or is party to any collective bargaining agreement in
connection with his or her employment with us.