If we publish our home brewed content without watermarks and it is lifted off google and used to compete against us, we have no effective recourse.
Detail:
In our company, one advancement track is from Customer Service to Products. It seems like a good and obvious thing to do, but typically photos and product materials in our space are produced by teams without direct experience helping customers make CPAP equipment work for them. We often find that the stock images and materials available to us are ineffective for internet customers, as they are often designed to target physicians and the owners of traditional brick and mortar CPAP retailers.
We have spent a lot of time and effort to do better. I believe we have. Our product presentations are end CPAP user driven and focused. We view both the images produced and the knowledge that produced them as an earned competitive advantage.
We've had instances where we woke up to find anothercpapco.com copying our product catalog verbatim. I think software patents slow innovation and that the DRM situation in the music industry is bad. Yet, I made the decision to water mark our images in order to prove them stolen.