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Is your name protected

20121007-094103.jpgSeveral months ago i recommended that specialists buy the domains to their names. I won’t go over the importance of professional email addresses versus a gmail, verizon et al extension. But I want reiterate the importance of buying your domain names.

If you are a specialist or a company and you elevate your position in this industry there are professional domain shoppers out there that will buy your name. When you finally decide to buy your own name you will see that it is already owned. So what does that mean? It means that a domain that could have originally cost $17.00 could now cost you hundreds of dollars from the person who saw your value before you did.

Buying the domain does not protect you from someone using your name if it is NOT trademark protected:

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A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device which is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms “trademark” and “mark” are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be registered with the Patent and Trademark Office. The registration procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks is described in a separate pamphlet entitled “Basic Facts about Trademarks”.

Trademark form

Additionally, if you write articles, produce programs etc you need to Copyrite them as well. Many of you have written very exclusive pieces that, if not protected, you won’t get credit fir your hard work:

Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.

The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

Copyrite form

Save yourself some money later and protect yourself today.

2 comments

  1. Stepfan Williams

    Very good advice. I learned this the hard way due to the fact that I trusted my web designer that went out of business and I did not have the information needed to keep my website up and running. I was fortunate enough to be able to track him down and now I own my domain name.

    1. Eric Konohia

      I think we all have some level of the same horror story.

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