Protect your digital IP
WDANZ has just completed a successful resolution of a major dispute between a very upset Roofing Company and a web developer who had failed to protect his own Intellectual Property. There is a real lesson in here.The essence of the dispute related to ownsership of a pre-built roofing website with a well optimised domain name. The roofing company claimed that they had "bought" the website, and the web development company (not a WDANZ member BTW) claimed that they owned the website, Domain Name and content and they only leased the website to the roofer. When a dispute arose between them, the web developer onsold the website (again by lease) to another roofing company and "all hell broke loose".
To say things got heated is an understatement with police, threats, reputations, court action, two replacement web development companies and more all getting involved.
Eventually we managed to reason with the various parties so that too much blood on the floor was avoided. The website was returned and everyone has now agreed to disagree about the past and get on with their lives.
The real lesson however was the amount of leverage that the disgruntled customer managed to engineer over the web developer he felt had "ripped him off". The disgruntled customer purchased the .co.nz Domain Name of the web developer's DOT COM personal domain name, as well the .biz, .info, .net, .org (to name a few!) While this is clearly cybersquatting the mere thought that a disgruntled customer would be blogging about him, putting details of the conflict onto a website with his own Domain Name, and preparing to optimise the websites with his own personal and business domain name was most likely a major factor in the "successful" outcome for all parties.
My advice to any person or company that has a reputation to protect online is to register their own personal Domain Names BEFORE trouble arises, simply to protect their IP, even if they have no direct use for them immediately. For an example, my personal website is www.dennis.co.nz but I also want to protect my personal name "Dennis Smith". I therefore redirect the Domain Name www.dennissmith.co.nz to www.dennis.co.nz. Both work and I have a degree of control over what I think is my rightful IP. Of course there are hundreds of variants internationally but the advice is that we should protect our rightful IP BEFORE trouble occurs.
Over more than 10 years in helping people in dozens of Domain Name disputes, so much heartache can be avoided for so little investment. Check out your own name availability at www.dnc.co.nz or checkout some personal names for sale at www.domainmasters.co.nz.
You have been warned!
Posted by Dennis A. Smith ~ Thursday 30 July 2009
