ExpertPreneurLaw℠ Blog

Food for thought on Copyright on the Internet

All ExpertPreneurs  must struggle with the effort, time and money needed to properly police their intellectual property rights on the Web.

But a recent piece by Andrew Glass of Politico.com should give pause to consider a real World perspective on the problem.

While the article is not written with ExpertPreneurs specifically in mind, the lesson in the article is quite instructive for them.

Even as the boundaries of copyright protection, and the claims for them, increase, seemingly exponentially, every day, there is a simple concept that must be applied to intellectual property rights as much as to everything else in life.

Since most ExpertPreneurs have limited time and money, they must determine the commercial value of their individual pieces of intellectual property to determine how much of that time and money they wish to devote to the protection of any particular piece.

This is where having a sound intellectual property protection strategy comes into play. Such a strategy is an indispensable tool for every ExpertPreneur.

An intellectual property strategy begins with a plan for the type of intellectual property you intend on creating and in what formats it will be distributed, e.g. a book, audio, DVD, etc.

Then, the commercial value of the piece, now or in the future, must be assessed, so that the greatest amount of available resources can be devoted to those works that are considered to be the most valuable.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that intellectual property protection is not an all or nothing game. Choosing to prioritize the the amount of resources used to protect certain works is not carte blanche to ignore the rest.

Instead, it should be used as a method to refine your intellectual property protection strategy to give some protection to some of your works, while giving more to the most important.

Fortunately, today's intellectual property legal systems afford a great deal of flexibility in how to approach these matters and all ExpertPreneurs would be wise to take this into account in formulating their intellectual property strategy.

Without this type of strategy, no ExpertPreneur can hope to have a systematic method of protecting their valuable works and risks having insufficient legal protections in place to go after infringement when it matters most.   

 

More on Domain Name Tasting

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, recently again called for feedback on the practice known as domain name tasting, previously reported in this Blog.

The practice refers to registrants taking advantage of current registration regulations that allow a five day grace period in which to cancel and avoid paying for registrations, by scooping up domain names, evaluating their ad generating revenue, and throwing underperforming ones back before having to pay for them.

While use of generic domain names increases security threats to the system and slows it down for everyone, ExpertPreneurs should take note of the potential for trademark infringement by those who register lapsed or purloined or typosquatting names, only to run off before their actions may be noticed or acted upon.

For smaller ExpertPreneurs who don't have the resources to monitor or pursue domain tasters that may be infringing on their marks and diverting traffic from their most popular pages, helping raise the pressure on ICANN to curtail the practice can only help.

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Domain Parking Taken to a Whole New Level

Some ExpertPreneurs with a substantial number of domains under their belt have, no doubt, had experience with domain parking problems.

For those unaccustomed to the practice, domain name parking basically takes common names  or generic terms, and points them to web pages that have little more than a mountain of pay per click Google ads, or the like, which the owners of the site profit from when they are clicked through.

Traditionally, these domain parking websites have had little in the way of actual substantive text or information, usually just enough, if at all, to be crawled by the search engines.

A recent New York Times article by Louise Story sheds light on the new heights to which this practice has been taken.  You might almost call it "Valet" domain parking.   

This raises an issue for ExpertPreneurs who wish to publicize their products and services by the use of easily recognized generic domain names.

First, the name chosen may be close to one used for domain parking by someone else, meaning that a person browsing may draw the wrong association between your site and that of the domain parker.

Second, if the name you pick is too generic, you may find much of your traffic siphoned off your piece of  the information highway and detoured where you don't want it to go.

Blogger by the Dozen

On my firm's website, one of the most frequently accessed articles is one that I wrote entitled "The Legal Risks of Blogs".

Over at the web and blog directory site, Akiva directory, there is a concise presentation of legal concepts applicable to blogging. Check it out at Blog Law » 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know .