–Dan Kelly, Attorney
You may have heard the news that iTunes has hit the 10 billion (with a “b”) mark in number of songs downloaded. Sales began in 2003. That’s an average pace of more than 1.4 billion downloads a year. Considering that a typical single song retails for $0.99 on iTunes (likely higher
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
If you are having any trouble with gift ideas this year, here is a novel idea: give a domain name. DomainRegistrar.info has published the results of a survey it conducted suggesting that there is an increased demand for domain names as gifts. While I have some reservations about the rigor of the
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–Dan Kelly, Attorney
A bomb exploded in the domain name aftermarket world on Wednesday. A well-known domain name auction house called SnapNames.com announced that one of its (now former) employees had been bidding as a shill in many online domain name auctions run by the company since 2005. SnapNames has an FAQ page on the matter here.
It is not difficult to decry the many abuses that have gone on in the domaining industry: cybersquatting, typosquatting, domain name tasting, domain name kiting, pay-per-click fraud, and now shill bidding (to name a few). As these abuses tend to make for the juciest news, it is not surprising that some (including trademark attorneys) accuse the whole domain name business (or “industry”) of being dirty. But law, being a generally slow, blunt instrument, has so far caught up with only the first two of the abuses listed above. What is less widely reported is that, for all of its wild-westness, the DN business has policed itself (e.g. cybersquatting, domain tasting) without resort to government intervention. This is as it should be.
Even so, self-policing is also slow to catch up to opportunists, so caveat emptor is the rule of the day in domain name transactions, especially when bidding at an auction, especially an online auction. I recommend reading any auction site’s rules, terms and conditions carefully before engaging in a transaction. Some of these sites will readily represent both buyer and seller, which is a situation well-known to lawyers and real estate agents as a “conflict of interest.” Caveat emptor, indeed.Continue Reading Fraud at Domain Name Auction House
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
I assume that most readers have heard that the universe of Internet domain names may be expanding next year. Instead of being limited to a finite number of relatively mundane top-level domain extensions like “.com” and “.org,” ICANN is planning to allow for the registration of any string of characters to the
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Back in April, I explained a little bit about how typosquatters can capitalize on direct navigation Internet traffic. I offered an example of the “omitted letter” typo: www.kellggs.com. Well, one omitted letter typo variant of .com is becoming widely available: .cm.
The TLD “.cm” is the country code top-level domain (“ccTLD”)
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
How did you get here? Seriously, how did you navigate to this web page? Is DuetsBlog.com in your bookmarks? (Do you have an Internet “loop”?) Perhaps you navigated directly by going to the little box at the top of the page and typing in “www.duetsblog.com.” If you did this last step, and
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
One of the shortcomings to living in the 21st century is that all of the land rushes are over. What an amazing way that was to get some land: just run right out there and put a stake in the ground. No messing with title insurance and mortgage bankers, and no need to inspect the property prior to purchase. Caveat emptor, indeed.
A loose analog to the old-time land rushes exists today, and that is the practice of domain name warehousing, or “domaining.” Unlike trademarks (at least in the U.S.), it is permissible (so far) to buy, sell, and store Internet domain names without using them. Not surprisingly, people do this. They are called “domainers,” and some of them make lots of money. The trick to making money off of a domain name portfolio is not just to buy low and sell high, although as you can see from my post last week, that may be lucrative enough.
The real trick is to make money while holding the domain names. This is called “monetizing” domain names. The most common way for a domainer to monetize a domain name is to place an array of pay-per-click (“PPC”) advertising links on a web page and hope to make more money on the revenue generated by those clicks than the domainer spends in maintaining the domain name and site. Even if this is only a few dollars a year on any given domain, a portfolio of thousands or hundreds of thousands of domain names (not uncommon) can start to generate a noticeable revenue stream.
Like land rushes of old, the Internet is still a bit of the wild west in our midst, and some domaining is legitimate, but much of it is not. Next week, I will touch on some of the abuses in this area, including cybersquatting and typosquatting.
Now, if you want to see a sample of what real domaining geeks talk about, look after the jump . . .Continue Reading Domaining: 21st Century Real Estate Speculation?
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
How much would you pay for an Internet domain name? Network Solutions just finished its “48-Hour Spring Sale” of domain names for $9.99 each. Go Daddy is offering domains for $6.99 each. The company 1&1 is offering .BIZ domain names for $3.99. Domain name prices typically cover registration and perhaps some basic web hosting and e-mail features for a year. But not all domain names are created equal. Presently, the domain name universe is one of the most unrestricted markets in existence, and one owner’s trash may be another’s treasure.
So here’s some trivia: how much do you think each of these domains sold for on the open market? Click below to see the answers after the jump . . .
| COMPUTERS.COM | TOYS.COM | DIAMONDS.COM | FUND.COM |