What You Should Know About Domain Names

Hi, this is attorney Mike Young. I would like to take a moment to discuss with you a very important legal topic for doing business on the internet - domain names. There is three points I would like to cover today, first of all your registrations. Now just because a domain name is available for you to register it doesn't mean you have the right to use it. Many people have trademarks for their businesses, for example Microsoft. If Microsoft.com suddenly became available and you could register it, that doesn't mean you would have the legal right to use it. In fact, probably what would happen is you would be hearing from Microsoft's lawyers. Because they wouldn't want you out there running a website with the name Microsoft when in fact Microsoft is a registered trademark of the Microsoft corporation.

Now the second issue I want to cover with you is ownership of your domain names. Many people when they start on the web will get a web designer to handle everything for them. Well unfortunately what happens with that, especially with internet marketers, is that when you do this the web designer registers the domain name with the web designer's owning it. So in essence what happens is, you setup a business online, you have paid to have the web designer setup the website, the website has been created, the domain name has been registered, everything is operating and you might even be making some decent money on your website. Now what happens when you get into a dispute with your web designer or your web designer disappears? Suddenly you discover that you have no access to your website and in fact that you don't even own the website. So what happens is that it was registered beginning with the web designer. So what's going to happen? Is it going to go to court? It's going to be expensive with legal fees. What are you going to do? So make sure that when you do register domains that you actually own the domain name that is being used for your website.

Now the third issue I want to cover today is domain registration and hosting. Now you can register your domain and often host your site at the same place. That can cause some problems in fact, I personally won't do that and here is why. What happens if you get in a dispute with your internet service provider, the person who is hosting your website and they decide to take you down? Now if you have your domain name registered there in addition to paying for them to host, it creates a lot of problems for you being able to find another place to host your site. Are you still going to be able to use the domain name? Were they going to try and cancel it on you? Will they even let you point it to a different internet service provider so that you can maintain your website, but just host it somewhere else?

Now these are all three issues that you need to consider when doing business on the web with regards to web domain names. Thank you very much, have a great day!