What are my obligations to the company with which I share a domain name?

February 1, 2008 9:34 AM

I own a .us domain that's been pretty dormant. I'd like to develop the site. The .com and .net versions of my domain are owned by a large company and redirect to the company's main site. Do I have to say somewhere on my site that I'm not affiliated with said company?

The content is directly related to the stuff company X sells, but won't mention company X or its products in any way. For example, if my site is about "how to customize your car," company X's site is Ford Motors. A reasonable person would know that my site has nothing to do with Ford's site, but I don't want to imply that I have their endorsement.

Note: I am not planning to sell anything. It's possible the site could be monetized down the road, but I have no idea what kind of traffic I'm going to get, and money is not the point of developing the site. However, company X's site does have an affiliate program, so given the similar subject matter, does it make sense to go that route rather than completely dissociating myself from company X?

posted by desjardins to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I'm not a lawyer.

As far as I know, you have no obligation to the company unless they dispute your domain name registration. If they dispute it and win, they will have the right to the domain name instead of you.

Here is the domain name dispute resolution policy for .us domains (it is similar to but separate from the policies for .com, .org, and .net).

If the large company disputed your domain name, they would need to prove:

i.Your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service
mark in which the Complainant has rights;

ii.You have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and

iii.Your domain name has been registered in bad faith or is being used in bad faith.
posted by burnmp3s at 10:04 AM on February 1, 2008

I am also not a lawyer.

It would be in your best interest to be as up front as possible that you are not affiliated.

As to your later question about "possibly" monetizing it, that would probably be all you need to be officially considered acting in "bad faith", setting you up to lose the domain due to arbitration.

See example 4 of this definition of "bad faith:"

It's a fine line, granted, but it's probably worth saving yourself the hassle and just running the site for funsies.

And a ton of this depends on the company in question. Do they have a history of actively filing UDRP complaints? Do a google search for their name and UDRP. This should give you some idea, as all ruling decisions are posted online, even though UDRP doesn't handle .us.

Side note: This is, indeed, part of my job. Every Friday, I wade through dozens and dozens of these rulings. It's pretty boring, most of the time. But sometimes you see things like this
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:14 AM on February 1, 2008

Does the company own a trademark on your domain name, or is it something generic? I mean if you were selling wrenches and owned 'wrenches.us' I can't imagine there would be a problem.
posted by delmoi at 10:23 AM on February 1, 2008

I'm not a lawyer, either. (But I am a 3rd year law student, who did pretty well in both trademark and internet law classes)

The first question to ask is delmoi's: does the company own the trademark used in the .com? Most large companies register their trademarks very aggressively, so go search the USPTO's TESS (Trademark Electronic Search Service). It's linked on the right sidebar here.

If the company doesn't have a trademark for the xxx.com, you have no domain-related obligations whatsoever, period.

If they do own the trademark, your best bet will be not to anger them. Do that with a) prominent disclaimers and b) not competing with them. Whether or not they could win a contested law suit is rarely how big companies decide whether or not to threaten or use the court system.

We could spend a long time talking about the technicalities of trademark law, but the bottom line is this: if you don't have the money to defend a law suit (if you do, you should be asking this question to a lawyer and not MeFi), none of those technicalities will matter if BigCo decides they want your domain. So play fair, be nice, and don't try to muscle in on BigCo's market, search terms (metatags), or anything of the sort.

To clarify spiffyrob's comment, "monetizing" a domain is not (necessarily) an example of bad faith. Attempting to SELL that domain to the real trademark owner, on the other hand, is. Simply collecting ad revenue is not, neither is selling things from the site (as long as you're not trying to screw the real TM owners).
posted by toomuchpete at 10:54 AM on February 1, 2008

delmoi - I'm not selling anything. It's a generic item like "posters." Actually, that's an excellent example, since posters.com redirects to barewalls.com. I own the equivalent of posters.us - but I'm telling people how to MAKE "posters", not selling them.

Sorry to be vague about the actual item - I don't want to self-link, and I don't want people going to the domain until I remove the crappy index page I created and put up something decent.
posted by desjardins at 11:02 AM on February 1, 2008

toomuchpete: no, the domain name does not come up in TESS. Their main .com site does show up as an "abandoned" trademark - but that is not the word I'm using, and it's such a generic word it might as well be "posters".
posted by desjardins at 11:06 AM on February 1, 2008

use your domain to forward people to another domain, example:

ford.us forwards you to fordfans.us

Then if they take away your first domain, your fans and content are still available on the second domain. Once you've got a site setup and have decent traffic, offer to sell the first domain to the company, in the hopes of avoid lawsuits.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:15 AM on February 1, 2008

toomuchpete...

Good catch. I misread the original question, and didn't see that desjardinsdomain.com redirects to the big commercial site. In this case, as desjardinsdomain.com is not the main point of entry, and not the name of the corporation, monetizing wouldn't be a slam dunk for bad faith at all. If the company was DESJARDIN'S DOMAIN INC, and their main site was desjardinsdomain.com, it probably would be. Although I don't think this was the intent of the Anti Cybersquatting Act, these days if a company XYZ runs XYZ.com, and you open up XYZ.us and have PPC advertising, you'll get hammered barring a poorly filed complaint.

But anyway, be up front about the lack of affiliation and you should be just fine to do what you please, desjardins.

On Preview: Do not do what blue_beetle is suggesting (offer to sell) unless you only ask to have your fees recouped. Then you will CERTAINLY lose an arbitration.
posted by SpiffyRob at 11:18 AM on February 1, 2008

SpiffyRob: you obviously have much more experience in the matter than I do, but I'd expect it the case to depend on whether the ads are the primary focus of the site (like a splog, for example) versus whether or not they're just chilling over in a sidebar while you provide other legitimate content.

All that aside, from desjardins' update, my non-legal opinion (I'm still not a lawyer) is that it should be fine.
posted by toomuchpete at 7:20 PM on February 1, 2008