Domains are one of the most serious assets to have on the Internet because they are the foundation of all you website and they are independent enough to sell them as an isolated units and for these reasons, there are many problems you could face when manipulating domains. First of all, although this article is about the legal side of domains, I'm not a lawyer and this could not be considered as legal advice, this is only for your information.
The Legal Side of Domains
The owner of the domain is legally responsible for all the activities done with the domain. If you publish copied content and you don't have the copyright, then you could be prosecuted for copyright violation and the fines in the US are steep for this kind of action being in the range of $100,000 to $150,000 so you should be very careful about what content you publish on your own domain.
Images are one of the most common things users put on their domains and you have 3 completely legal ways to use them without copying them from other websites:
1. Create your own images.
This is very expensive and probably not worth your time.
2. Use copyright free from stock images libraries.
This is one of the best ways to make your blog or website look pretty without incurring in legal problems. One very inexpensive resources is Fotolia, which has an excellent collection of images for a very low price.
3. Use Images with Creative Commons licensing.
Although Creative Commons is a copyright, is a kind of copyright more adapted to the Internet, since it allow to use images f you tell the world where you have taken those images from. One place you could search for this kind of images is Flickr, but not all flickr images use the creative commons licensing and you should read what type of license is using the image you want to take from there.
Cyber Squatting
Cyber squatting is the act to register a domain that is a known brand name. In the United State you will have no luck with this since the owner of a brand could sue you with the ICANN (the top organization that deals with domain names) and if the judge says that your domain name corresponds to a known brand, you will lose your domain immediately. This type of activity is still used in other countries, were the legislation is not so clear. For example: several years ago, I knew about one client that paid $5,000 dollars for a domain that was taken by someone that knew in advance that this company was about to open a service using their brand name.
Other Legal Problems
You have to be careful to register domains that are not part of a brand. Some time ago, I registered the domain: ebaysellingtips.com and short after that, I received a notification from eBay that they will start legal action if I didn't let that domain expire. I learned the lesson the hard way, so don't register domains with brands in them or misspelling of a brand or you could face very disturbing troubles in the future. You don't have such problems if you are promoting affiliate programs and people do register those brand name domains because you get an advantage from Google in the search results, since Google prefer pages that have the exact match domain in the page, but I'm staying away from such tactics more and more and settling for my own brands like one domain I registered to promote the kidney stone removal report with the keyword: Kidney Stone Removal Report Review.
I also sell hosting services in Spanish and several years ago I used to register domains to my name to manage them for my client because they usually lost them because they didn't know how to manage them. One client did something illegal and all of the sudden I was involved in a legal problem that finally closed without consequences for me, but that was another hard lesson. Don't assume legal risks for other people's actions, never! That goes not only for domains, but for bank accounts, PayPal accounts and many other things related to money.
No comments:
Post a Comment