Lawyers Suck!
lurksteraz on November 17th, 2007
I’m sure everyone has had this happen to them.
You research a niche to find that it’s untapped, great pay, and a gem waiting to be polished to make some money. Well, I signed up for some affiliate accounts(can’t say which yet), register the perfect domain name and start to build out the website.
After the site is built, I like to launch with no ads and let marinate for a while. Get the site indexed, build some links and wait about a month before really pushing anything on it. So, the site does better than I thought with natural rankings and starts to compete with the main affiliate site.
Within a month, I get an email and also a letter from a lawyer stating that the domain I registered infringes on a trademark and I need to ‘cease and desist’ while turning over the domain name. But the weird thing was that in the letter, it seemed to mainly speak of ‘Unfair Competition’. I’m sure there is a bunch of legal mambo-jambo that I don’t understand, but fuck it.
The last time I checked, the purpose of offering an affiliate program is to create more sales for the company and for the affiliate… This kind of crap pisses me off, especially since the site was ranking great naturally.
In the end, I lose no matter what. I removed the site, and have to turn over the domain name. If I ever hear of anyone promoting this particular site or mentioning anything about it, I will do my best to sway them against promoting the at all costs.
I would have thought that a business would want to be promoted to make money, I guess not.
