Sports Team Domains...illegal?

I had a great idea of developing a sort of community site for a sports team, or college team(along with throwing in affiliate offers for tickets, jerseys, and merchandise).But i cant seem to find any site that is doing this, would it be illegal if i register MiamiHeat.com or TheHeat.com(both are exampel that are obviosuly registered already).

I'm interested in the answer to this as well. I'm thinking about a fan site. Thanks to the veteran that can enlighten me.

You don't need a lawyer to answer this question, only a little common sense.

A fanpage like on facebook is one thing, but using the specific sports team in the domain name can easily result in loss of your domain. That includes variations of the names.

You'll probably get away with something like this for awhile, but once the upper management at these times catches wind, you'll lose your domain pronto.

Especially if you are using their trademarks. However, to accomplish your goal doesn't really require those domain names does it? There are no laws against being a fan, or having a website dedicated to your favorite star/actress/sports-team. You just can't use trademarked names in appropriately.

Miami Heat = Miamihotness.com
Boston Celtice = BostonBBMachine.com

Why should your domain name require the actual sports team name? You can do everything needed in content/titles for SEO, and of course it would be better to have the trademarked terms in the domain title, but NOT necessary.

Hope that helps.

Here's one that's been around for years http://www.hailredskins.com/

a lot of these sports team names are generic. I would stick with generics.

I worked for one company that was trying to market domain names to people in the US. We had over 4000 domain names of just about every description. Many of them were trademarked names. I can think of 3 companies that did threaten action and the result was the same everytime. If we had their trademarked name in the domain we simply gave them the name. Never had to give any revenue generated off the domain name prior to being alerted to the the "violation". Seemed like this was pretty common for the "Big Boys" legal department. The legal forms all had the same basic verbage.

I think you have to be fairly derivative - perhaps stick with nicknames or teritiary names like "WhoDatNation", "CubbieLove", - that type of thing.

I own a NBA related fan forum that incorporates the teams name in it and so far (4 years) we have had 0 issues. We even have press credentials so it works for us.

heres another one that is pretty big they use the teams name but use a generic logo

raiderfans/n3t

Thanks for the response guys! But would it be illegal for me to generate revenue from sites of this nature?Selling t-shirts, affilate sales from ticket sites and such

double post...thought it would never happen to me

I've seen lots of populated forums with the name inside the domain name