Advice Please: Lawyers threatening me for using "their" domain name

Nice quick profit. I bet they had some trouble with previous 'like' domain owners slagging them off.

I only hope that the adsense wouldn't have got you more than $800 over a year.

Oh and one last thought..... is the .co available?

Hi,

Have not read all the thread, however having been through what you are going through and been threatened in directly by a brief representing brand name making millions every year, I was advised by Lawyers to just give up the Domain. It was hard as it was getting 200 hits per day and now the name gets 18k visitors per month but it was a case of losing my house or walking away and they had deeper pockets than me.

Good luck

Comrade, you inspire me. can you send me the exact email you use to blackmail them. I am planning to register a lot of mortgage domains. I have big budget I could register 100 domains. This will be easy money for me. President Hu Jintao don't give a sh1t about US Laws, doesnt even give a c-r-a-p to his own peoples.

PM me comrade, We could do JV.

PS. excuse language. english hardness.

CHINA is DOMINATE

This inspired me to follow through on a project similar. Thx OP

I went through this last year with a domain name of my own. Really, in my instance, someone had an exact match trademark against my domain name. Well, my domain name had a hyphen in it, but still, it was close enough for Godaddy to shut down my hosting account for all of my websites for a week (shakes fist).

First thing I would do is run a trademark search in the trademark database to see if it is legit. If there is no trademark for that exact term, I don't believe they have any ground.

Another thing you could do is consider getting a pre-paid legal membership. The wife and I have that for our businesses and it's saved our butts a few times already. A couple of free conversations with a domain name dispute attorney will set your mind at ease and clear up any questions.

wizzkidd said:

NEWS FLASH - NEWS FLASH

Settlement fee agreed! But the best bit is that i denied their offer of $500 and got them to push it up to $800 !!!

Hows about that ey?

:aetsch:

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congrats

I have had to take down 3 sites because of this.
They were just adsense sites so it was no problem letting them go.
I don't use brand names in domains anymore.
Just got a different domain in the niche and moved the content there.

Thanks to everyone that offered me advice in this thread, some of it useful, some of it plain stupid but funny as hell!

wrangler said:

This is the right time to say "I bet you could have gotten more" ;-)

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@Wrangler i know what you mean, but its always the case, could I have got more? who knows but i feel better knowing that I didn't settle at their first offer.

thesaintv12 said:

Nice quick profit. I bet they had some trouble with previous 'like' domain owners slagging them off.

I only hope that the adsense wouldn't have got you more than $800 over a year.

Oh and one last thought..... is the .co available?

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@thesaintv12 The law firm that dealt with this "case" are renownd for fighting on behalf of their clients with regards to domain parking etc, and domain trademarks etc. They brag about it on their website about how many cases they won and how many domain names they re-claimed - so I am absolutley shocked that they settled with me. The domain/site i had was only 2 weeks old, had not even made $4 in adsense, and it was one of many niche sites I just started, so I did not expect it to make a lot of money on its own anyway. So all in all, a good outcome I think. BTW, I think the .co IS available, but in the settlement agreement contract I had to agree not to register any other domains carrying any of their family of marks and also to handover/release any other domains that may be trademarked with them or their clients. I think i'll just sit in the corner, count my money, and consider myself lucky and not push my luck.

BrackhatChina said:

Comrade, you inspire me. can you send me the exact email you use to blackmail them. I am planning to register a lot of mortgage domains. I have big budget I could register 100 domains. This will be easy money for me. President Hu Jintao don't give a sh1t about US Laws, doesnt even give a c-r-a-p to his own peoples.

PM me comrade, We could do JV.

PS. excuse language. english hardness.

CHINA is DOMINATE

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@ BrackhatChina Now this is amusing to me. Thank you for the compliment, however I think this whole saga was a bit nerve wrecking for me and I consider myself as being lucky with the outcome. There is no guarentee that the outcome would be the same for other domain names in this niche or trademarked with this company. You are a brave man to want to do this on a large scale. I will PM you with some information, but I'd rather NOT play any involvement in deliberatley registering trademarked domain names with the intention of making money from a settlement.

...
...

Oh by the way, you'll never guess what just came through the post this morning (via snail mail)... ANOTHER letter from a law firm for a completely different website domain I have, and a completely different law firm in a completely different state in America (i.e This is totally unrelated to the last case). I'm not sure how to feel about this? Excited that I could potentially make some money AGAIN?, or annoyed because I shouldn't push my luck again?, and just release the domain name and walk away? Nevertheless, I found it amusing to see the letter! Do I have "SUE ME" written on my forehead?

All the best,

N

Lucky Bastard

I would try to sell the domain to them,if i were in your condition..

-test- (i click on page 3) ??

wizzkidd said:

Thanks to everyone that offered me advice in this thread, some of it useful, some of it plain stupid but funny as hell!


@Wrangler i know what you mean, but its always the case, could I have got more? who knows but i feel better knowing that I didn't settle at their first offer.


@thesaintv12 The law firm that dealt with this "case" are renownd for fighting on behalf of their clients with regards to domain parking etc, and domain trademarks etc. They brag about it on their website about how many cases they won and how many domain names they re-claimed - so I am absolutley shocked that they settled with me. The domain/site i had was only 2 weeks old, had not even made $4 in adsense, and it was one of many niche sites I just started, so I did not expect it to make a lot of money on its own anyway. So all in all, a good outcome I think. BTW, I think the .co IS available, but in the settlement agreement contract I had to agree not to register any other domains carrying any of their family of marks and also to handover/release any other domains that may be trademarked with them or their clients. I think i'll just sit in the corner, count my money, and consider myself lucky and not push my luck.


@ BrackhatChina Now this is amusing to me. Thank you for the compliment, however I think this whole saga was a bit nerve wrecking for me and I consider myself as being lucky with the outcome. There is no guarentee that the outcome would be the same for other domain names in this niche or trademarked with this company. You are a brave man to want to do this on a large scale. I will PM you with some information, but I'd rather NOT play any involvement in deliberatley registering trademarked domain names with the intention of making money from a settlement.

...
...

Oh by the way, you'll never guess what just came through the post this morning (via snail mail)... ANOTHER letter from a law firm for a completely different website domain I have, and a completely different law firm in a completely different state in America (i.e This is totally unrelated to the last case). I'm not sure how to feel about this? Excited that I could potentially make some money AGAIN?, or annoyed because I shouldn't push my luck again?, and just release the domain name and walk away? Nevertheless, I found it amusing to see the letter! Do I have "SUE ME" written on my forehead?

All the best,

N

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What an amazing story really! And a great outcome...

COuld you please PM me with more informations too?
Im from outside the US and I would like to try this locally at least 1 time to try my luck

Please do not get me wrong, I did not do this intentionally, and I do not intend to do it intentionally again. "Trying your luck" could lead to you having to pay thousands in legal fees if the defending domain name put a claim against you and follow through. I was simply lucky, and although I may not know why, I dont think it would be the same outcome for everybody. For example, they mentioned to me in one of our emails that they have researched my website (based on my email address) and noticed that I have been running a successfull business on line for 10 years.. etc - so could that have swayed anything in my favour? Who knows?

- N

Just give them the domain at no cost and move on. Its not worth the trouble.

domaining said:

Just give them the domain at no cost and move on. Its not worth the trouble.

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I appriciate your comment, but reading the first few messages of a topic and then jumping to the end to make a comment sometimes ends up with you writing a comment thats not relevent. FYI, I was fortunate NOT to have given the domain and given up, and as a result i bagged $800

domaining said:

Just give them the domain at no cost and move on. Its not worth the trouble.

Click to expand...

I appriciate your comment, but reading the first few messages of a topic and then jumping to the end to make a comment sometimes ends up with you writing a comment thats not relevent. FYI, I was fortunate NOT to have given the domain and given up, and as a result i bagged $800

I don't believe they can sue you for anything of that sort.

I was jerked around by a local car dealership so I bought a domain name based on their local company name and got it ranked higher than their own website.

Obviously this pissed them off to no end so they first offered to buy it from me, then when I agreed they used that against me that I was squatting on it to make money from them. Fools!

Then they had the corporate lawyers send me the letter to give up the domain to them or they were going to take it to court.

Naturally I wasn't going to do that so I ignored them for a while to let them send a few more letters, rack up their legal fees, etc.

Then in the end I just changed all of the registrar info to another dealer company of the same name in another state, then set up the 301 redirect on the domain to send all traffic to that other dealers site.

I'm sure that pissed them off they didn't win, and the other site got some free traffic for a while until the domain expired.

Cheers!

Wizzkidd thank You for this thread. I got a bit more insight what to watch out.
Also others who shared their story!

I recently got a cease and desist letter from a gov agency claiming that my site too closely resembled their's. I used their logo, copied and pasted their html frame format and even used a "very similar" domain with a .org.
Needless to say, I followed their instructions quickly.