Page 1 of 7 08/19/10 - How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your BranD: Chapter 2 of 10: Domain Names [??????????] Tweet style="height:25px !important;" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="320" src="http://www.linksalpha.com/social?link=http%3A%2F%2Fwardblawg.com%2F20 10%2F08%2F19%2Fhow-to-dominate-the-internet-book-one-protect-your-brand-ch apter-2-of-10-domain-names%2F"> 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 Page 2 of 7 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 Page 3 of 7 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. Page 4 of 7 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 Page 5 of 7 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. Page 7 6 of 7 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, Page 8 of 7 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