08/19/10 - How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect... [??????????] Tweet style="height:25px !important;" frameborder="0"

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08/19/10 - How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your BranD: Chapter 2 of 10: Domain Names
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Before discussing acquiring domain names appropriate to your business, I have
some important updates:
First I have new advertisement sponsors to replace Google. They are called adbrite,
addynamo and bidvertiser. Competition is good. This site has put me about £500 in
debt and I don't have an NQ job, so I think you may see why I need the sponsorship
and donations. As promised, once this site, as a legal information provider, shows
signs of turning profitable, I will donate at least 10% continuously to charity, mainly
in Scotland. Not many people know this but I had some pretty serious surgery I
needed to have last year. And I think that giving back to the less fortunate is one
branch of Yin and Yang philosophy that should not be ignored. Uncertainty, much
like legal uncertainty, is good for nobody.
Alas, having spoken again with my former boss Fiona Nicolson of Bristows, who is
closely connected with the St Andrews Clinics for Children ("STACC"), STACC is to
be my primary charity for 2010-2011, along with the charities at my Charity page,
above and here. A lot of the unfortunate people there don't even know what a
computer is, so think about them before you learn anything here or anywhere else
about how to develop your own business.
Third, please subscribe, both to this central blawG and to most of the social media
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outlets to which WardblawG has itself subscribed, available here.
Fourth, see if you want greater search engine presence and, thus, greater SEO for
your website all for free. For info, http://sitesubmiturl.com clearly makes their money
through camouflaged Google Adsense links. Around £2 per click isn't bad!
Best wishes
Gavin
Now, stage left, enter WardblawG...
Domain names: one giant leap for the blawGosphere
The second step I would suggest is creating at least one domain name, ideally a
.com registration reflecting verbatim your brand name. Do this through a reputable
host of which there are many.
Dreamhost and, within that, WordPress offer and operate a very simple but effective
domain name registration and domain name management process. I have used this
process a lot in the past two months, with each registration having cost me between
£6 and £10, depending both on US to UK currency and on whether I was using the
full hosting service at Dreamhost or the relatively free WordPress.org. WardblawG
started out with WordPress.com then migrated to WordPress.org for greater
functionality. The dot org is to be preferred because of its acceptance of plugins and
ads.
At the moment, my domains are either hidden, parked, or linked back to the central
WardblawG website. These paths chosen will be mentioned in Book Two of this
series, which shall be published, hopefully, in September.
Registering a .co.uk: enter Nominet
If your business trades in the UK, consider registering a .co.uk domain with Nominet
. Surprisingly, WardblawG has found the Nominet procedure to be less user-friendly
and more expensive than the indirect methods used under other sites, such as
GoDaddys. It is understood that Nominet is the official registrar of
.commercial.unitedkingdom domains but, even still, it must be asked why the fee for
Nominet is ten times that of .com registration. Surely this emanates somewhat from
a restriction on competition. For long-term subscribers to this site, it is worth noting
that WardblawG gets very angry with restriction on competition, particularly when a
shoddier service is tied into a decent product: enter Microsoft's Internet Explorer
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against Mozilla Firefox and all the other big brands of web browser. It took the main
competition commissions of the US and the EU quite some work and some hefty
fines before Microsoft finally relinquished its tight grasp of some of its monopoly
over the web browser market. Wondering what the tie-in was? Think about when
you buy a Windows PC and start it up for the first time. Does it come fully loaded
with media player and web browser etc? It used to. Now you will notice that the
consumer is given a choice, despite a relatively weaker effort by Microsoft to plug its
own software ahead of other competition. That's not to say that Microsoft's products
aren't useful. But there is always room for improvement, especially where
competition is strong. Enter The Recession which is refusing to Exit, even as we
descend deeper in the tenties.
Registering a .co: enter cybersquatting
Another potential consideration, the .co domain, formerly exclusive to Colombia,
was opened up recently to the planet. WardblawG's opinion is that it's a waste of
money to register with .co and that it is unfortunate that so many businesses have,
effectively, been coerced into doing so just in case cybersquatters manage to steal
their .co domain and thereby rule the .co world. WardblawG has to wonder who it
was that needed the cash to procure the opening of .co to the world. Or perhaps it
will be the next major step in web 2.0 or web 3.0: afterall, .co takes less effort to
type than .com.
But even outwith .colombia, you should still beware of cybersquatters who stalk
every corner of the web. Consider the financial crisis last year: when an HBOS and
Lloyds merger seemed imminent, cybersquatters pounced onto their keyboards to
register domains such as LloydsHBOS.com here, which, surprise surprise, currently
exists as what is called a "parked" domain where a host advertisers on the site
fishing for click revenue from unsuspecting users. When Merrill Lynch was in
trouble, guess what was registered by someone trying to get first past the host?:
bankofamericamerrilllynch.com here. How inventive; not! Interestingly, that name is
now owned by Bank of America. WardblawG wonders if BoA paid through the nose
for it.
Further obiter, any brand or domain beginning with the letter "i" costs an absolute
fortune. WardblawG wonders wtf KFC is doing trade marking "iTwist" other than to
sell it back to Apple at a later point. And sticking a commercial advert on TV
advertising its iTwist processed food with a person dancing about with headphones
on further illustrates why the food should not have "i" or "information" anywhere in
its title. Food that gives your brain information? Or processed food that will chop
your life-span in half? Who knows.
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PPS obiter, and this is perhaps the biggest but most useful tangent this evening:
music has been known to improve your memory. Most of this theory came from
people who listened to Mozart and thought they were smarter because of it.
Apparently, it's either because they were smart in the first place and had
hypochondria, or, because listening to any type of music is beneficial. WardblawG
has said this once and he'll say it again, creativity plus logic synergise to produce
genius. Tony Buzan, I'm sure, will back me up with that one. His mindmap idea got
me the firsts I got at Glasgow University. These mindmaps will, as I have promised,
be published on this site or on flickr here at a later point once I work out which ones
are copyrighted, such as lecture notes, and those which are not, such as my own
exam preparation notes.
A Hobbit and Three Trolls
Anyway, a cybersquatter has been kind enough in its IP-troll role to mess up your
business plans. Can we resolve the dispute with them? Yes we can, as Barack
Obama would say. President Obama chose a political career rather than a career as
a corporate lawyer, but I'm sure even he would agree, perhaps through his Twitter
account here that you can do at least three legal things legally with a cybersquatter:
First, you can take them to ICANN's Uniform Dispute Resolution
Procedure or "UDRP" as it is branded, and explained here;
Second, you can take them to court, although probably not Paisley
Sheriff Court; or
Third, you could try to resolve your dispute extrajudicially to regain
control of the domain name you deserve.
But all three of these methods will cost you, either in legal fees or in ransom money
which the cybersquatter almost certainly will demand from you, if not refuse to
communicate entirely. Don't believe me?: See the Bank of America Merrill Lynch
domain name sale on ebayhere where the BBC also discusses the click-through
value of the automated ads on the sites, which negate the need for a purely
capitalistic focus. Luckily, this blawgger knew the law before venturing onto the web,
so at the beginning WardblawG might have had 99 problems, but a domain name
wasn't one. Indeed, registering even several or 99 domain names wasn't one thanks
to Dreamhost. Take USblawG here, for instance.
Cybersquatting on Twitter
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Cybersquatting has now spread to Twitter. When you realise how Twitter urls work,
it becomes a no-brainer why this has happened and indeed still is happening.
Twitter operates its urls by http://twitter.com/[insert brand name here]. So, for
instance, WardblawG is at http://twitter.com/WardblawG. Barack Obama is at
http://twitter.com/barackobama . Things start to go wrong when a user registers
someone else's name or brand name as their twitter username and, thus, as their
Twitter Url. This has been covered in The Twitter Rules for which further reference
should be made.
For further reading on the legal issues surrounding Twitter cybersquatting and
indeed trade mark infringement with other social media sites, see tcattorney's blog
post at
http://tcattorney.typepad.com/domainnamedispute/2009/09/trademark-misuse-in-fac
ebook-twitter-and-other-social-media-names.html
Company Names Adjudicator under the Companies Act 2006
The Company Names Adjudicator was established on 1 October 2008. That piece of
information is in tiny writing at the top left of this mind map. Follow the mindmap
round to learn the rest. If you start squinting your eyes, please comment as such
and different ways will be considered for getting this information onto the web.
WardblawG's aim is free up all his University mindmaps onto the web, so watch this
space.
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Company Names Adjudicator: A new way to protect your branDDomain Names
and Trade Marks
If anything, it is much cheaper to register a domain than to register a trade mark,
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which is why the third step, that of trade marking your brand, should follow
immediately after domain name registration, if not simultaneously. Guess what
Chapter 3 is going to be about?
Wardblawg Court of Session Linkedin
Related posts:1. How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your BranD:
Chapter 1 of 10: Branding
2. How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your BranD:
Prologue
3. Law 2.0 Search Engine
4. YouBlawG
5. Foreword to the WardblawG: Lawnovation