Domains & Trademarks: Webmaster in Hell

Introduction

Once upon a time me and a friend wanted to open up a message board for our favorite author. We got the domain, we got the site done, then we made a mistake by contacting their lawyer about approving us to be official. The end result? Our domain was taken away, we were threatened legal action for having a similar color scheme to the site, and were forced to abandon the idea. Moral of the story is: Dont try and create something out of someone elses idea.

Why should I care?

I see it all the time on internet marketing forums, people wanting to make a quick buck out of buying and selling domains that just so happened to be available and include keywords such as big brands, book titles, television shows, and movies. The truth is that if youre found having one of these domains, theyre going to go after you. They wont care about the effort being put into maintaining these sites, theyll just want to refund you the original price that the original person bought it at. So what if you dont want to give it up? Theyll fine you $25,000 for copyright infringement and force it out of you at court. This is where little internet marketers like you mean nothing, you end up becoming a rotten name in the books.

But why didnt they register it themselves?

When protecting a brand name, companies dont automatically register every little keyword related domain that they can think of because itd cost them more than billions of dollars every year to obtain every single TLD. But, they do monitor the search engines and get information from people who see these domains being registered. When youre creating a product, you dont usually see it being a huge sellout, so youre not going to always want to get even the three domain .com, .org, .net.

Why not ban *TRADEMARK* registrations?

Its not just about that, people often make a living buying and selling misspelled domains too. The same people I dealt with always had the problem where people would register absolutely anything that would get accidental hits to their page. You see it with eBay, PayPal, and Twitter too, although those are much on the lines of being created to obtain identity information. I guess the trademark owners themselves need to have their thrill and make a quick couple of thousand from us too.

Conclusion

These websites have a high risk to become a nightmare for anyone that puts their energy into making one. If youve noticed all the legal action being taken towards torrent tracker owners, thats exactly how a lot of these TwilightFifthMovie.com, BradPittWorkingTitle.info, and AppleTabletInfo.net sites could end up being. Its a good $10 investment, but not worth losing every cent youve made from it. Its better to include the keywords in the title and description than it is to have it in the domain itself, keep that in mind.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ads
• affiliate
• clones
• content
• writing
• e-books
• google
• money
• rss
• seo
• social
• bookmarking
• trends
• twitter
• visitors
• wikipedia

[thorntongifts]

FIGHT THE NWO EVERYDAY!