Unplain

I’m not sure why, but it seems that every friend of mine that wanted to try their hand at domaining wound up registering trademarked names that were available or unflattering trademarked name combos. Why is that?

I had a close friend who was my business account banker at my local Chase bank registered a few years ago the name “aolgoogle.com” I told him he was asking for trouble. He said that since Google had a minor investment in AOL, he figured they would come knocking and offer him a crapload of money for the name.

Wrong.

The name combo had some traffic but he was playing with fire.

Sure enough, they came-a-knocking. He sent me a copy of  the complaining email and asked what to do. Before I could respond, he fired off an expletive filled email back to the complaining lawyer basically saying to the effect to “eats his shorts” amongst other sayings.

Lol, I pretty much told my friend that it was over and to just turn over the name and be done with it.

Anyway to make a long story short, the complainant got the name quite easily. Good.

Last year I had two acquaintances who were new to domaining started registering names that were trademarked and unflattering word combos. With the hopes they could cash in with the complaining companies paying them off to get those unflattering somewhat libelous names back…

sigh.

I’ve explained what was wrong to all the unnamed domainers listed above.  Cybersquatting? Extortion? oops!

Attention new domainers!

Get good generic names. You cannot go wrong. Stay away from any trademarked or questionable names. Because if you do register TM names, you may just get screwed with alot more than the threat of names being taken away from you. 

 Hey, before I forget, signup for my emails on the form shown below. Why? Cuz I’ll tell you stuff you won’t see on the blog.

That means the thousands of people who read blogs that don’t signup simply won’t be “in the know” with a few things. But you will…