First, lets start with a general background of the ACPA. It was enacted back in 1999, and for the most part are there to hold people liable who register domain names with a trademark, or an individual’s name, and have the sole intent of selling the domain name to the trademark holder or individual. Basically what this act is saying is if you own the domain name TigerWoods.com for example, Tiger Woods would have exclusive rights to the domain name.

The first part of this act doesn’t bother me at all. I think trademarked names shouldn’t be allowed to be registered by an individual who doesn’t hold the trademark. That’s complete fair. If I owned Google, I wouldn’t want someone opening a search engine called Googley.com. It’s unfair, and this act protects Google from that happening. I am not opposed to that at all.

What I am extremely opposed to is that the act protects individual names. I don’t think it is a right to own the domain name with your name in it. It’s business. Someone beat you to registering that domain name. It’s your own fault for not registering it earlier. They should have every right to sell it to you or another buyer. It’s kind of like when you go into a store to buy a candy bar. The person infront of you takes the last Reece’s, the candy you wanted. They beat you to getting that candy. They should have full rights to buy that candy. Of course, this is a very general example, it gets across the general gist of what I have to say.

I just don’t see why individual’s have the right to their own domain name. Business is business. As long as it’s legal, you can profit. If I invest my $10 in buying a domain name, that happens to be the name of a golfer, I should have every right to make money off of his name, and make money by selling it to him, especially if it’s for a reasonable price. The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act allows the individual to take the domain from me, as well as the profits I made off of his name.

Now, of course when you state an opinion, there’s always a flip side to that opinion. ICANN, as well as others who are in support of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, say that if someone else owns the domain name with an individual’s name in it, they can misrepresent the domain name to the public. My comment to that is that the law should be if you are misrepresenting the individual, they have the right to seize the domain from you. If you are not misrepresenting the individual, you should be able to own that domain. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

I read something interesting about what happens if you are guilty of acting contrary to the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. You will be forced to either cancel, or transfer the domain to the individual or trademark owner, as well as be obligated to pay between $1,000 and $100,000 in damages at the court’s discretion and if the plantiffs request damages. So the punishment is harsh.

As I said earlier, the first part of this doesn’t bother me at all, that the act protects against trademarked names. It’s the second part that bugs me. Anyways, sorry for making this so long, it was just a VERY interesting topic that I know is rarely debated, but highly debatable when brought up. So I wanted to get viewer’s opinions on the ACPA as well, to see how mine match up. Please make sure to comment below!

Passwords

One of the most important things you can do not only in domaining, but in your everyday life as well, is choose passwords for your accounts that even someone whose close to you would never be able to guess, and keep them a secret. A lot of domain thefts have been due to theives hacking into GoDaddy, or other registrars accounts of other users. You need to pick passwords that won’t be guessed by anyone at all.

Forums

A lot of domaining is done over the forums. You need to be more alert on some forums more then others. The three main domaining forums are DNForum.com, NamePros.com, and Forums.DigitalPoint.com. Forums.DigitalPoint.com is definitely where the most scammers hang around, and are indirectly allowed to hang around. You should always be very alert when domaining there. NamePros is for the most part a very clean, respected forum. And I think that is a result of its caring, dedicated management. But it is a free forum, so keep in mind, any new scammer could join there for free, and steal a domain, free of charge basically. DNForum is definitely the safest I would say. Despite the recent theft that took place there, it’s a forum where you must pay money to join. So scammers will tend to stick around other free forums rather then paying to steal domains.

Conclusion to Part I

Well, as you can see, this was rather short, but these are two key, basic tips to domain safely. Stay tuned for Part II where I will go more in depth and provide a few more detailed ideas that are very important for all domainers to keep in mind. Anyways, I would love to hear any comments you all have, so be sure to submit them below!

The reason I noticed this was because a couple a days ago, I was purchasing 3 or 4 domain names through GoDaddy. As I sped through the checkout process, when it asked me to confirm that I wanted to pay X amount, it came up with an extremely high number like $150 or $175. Of course at this point, my eyes shot open. So I went back in the checkout process to change each domain’s registration down to 1 year.

It was a very close one though. I had almost gone through with paying $150 or $175 for 3 or 4 domain names, that in this economy would be hard to sell for profit, even though they would have been registered for 5 years. Quite frankly, because I did this before I went to bed, had it been an hour or so later, I would have probably gone through with the purchase without realizing.

So domainer’s, be careful when registering your GoDaddy domain names. It is very important to look out for small schemes like this, that big companies like GoDaddy will come up with, and have many people fall for their trap We would all love to hear your comments!

Recently, one of our newer websites, JokerBux.com was hacked. It had pornographic pictures and links all over it, pop-ups, and more. I decided to contact one of my good friends Matt, who is one of the owners of a website security company, iGosh.org. He is sort of my go-to-guy when something goes wrong with one of my websites. After listening to his intelligent thoughts on the situation, I was very quick to hire iGosh to fix JokerBux up, and all the loopholes in it. Within minutes, they found and fixed the hack, and fixed other loopholes in the script as well that I didn’t know about.

I would definitely recommend iGosh.org to all website owners to either do vulnerability tests, or fix your site that’s been hacked. If you would like more information on iGosh, please visit their website by clicking the following link: iGosh.org.

When I was scammed, the scammers all had different PayPal and GoDaddy emails. And they had one name that they told me to transfer the domain to, and one name on their Paypal account from where they sent the payment. These are two major signs of a fraudulent buyer/seller. The GoDaddy and PayPal emails are just a clue in that you may want to look into this guy a little more and make sure he is legit. But when he wants you to transfer the domain to a different name then the PayPal payment was sent from, and the emails aren’t matching, be very careful. Wait for the payment to clear. Take precautions. This is just a helpful hint when wanting to make sure a buyer is absolutely legitimate.