Can I recover a lost domain name for my business? As a domain name lawyer, I hear this kind of question all the time from small businesses to large companies, from Internet startup companies and venture backed capital companies all the way on up to companies that are doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Companies and businesses, startups lose their domain names all the time, and it's not something that you want to happen to you or your company or business.
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Can I recover a lost domain name for my business? As a domain name lawyer, I hear this kind of question all the time from small businesses to large companies, from Internet startup companies and venture backed capital companies all the way on up to companies that are doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Companies and businesses, startups lose their domain names all the time, and it's not something that you want to happen to you or your company or business.
My name is Enrico Shaffer. I'm an attorney that specializes in domain name and Internet law, and today we're going to be talking a little bit about how to recover a lost domain for your business when either the webmaster takes it or a cyber squatter takes it or a hacker takes it from you without your permission or knowledge.
The first thing we want to talk about today is the multiple ways in which someone can actually take control of your domain name. Your domain name is controlled by the registrant account with the registrar with whom you registered your domain name. So if you registered your domain name with GoDaddy and you registered it in your business name or your company name, then that account log in for GoDaddy is the key to controlling your domain name and maintaining the fact that it can be renewed every year, making sure that no one else takes your domain name and that it doesn't lapse back into the domain name system so that someone can pick it up and start using it for themselves.
Let's face it, as a company, your primary calling card in today's highly networked, trafficked on-line world is your URL, is your domain name. So if you were to lose that, it could cost your reputation, profits, and business. So you need to protect it as a valuable company and business asset.
It is critical that you do an audit to find out what domain names you or your business own and understand who has control of the registrant log in with the registrar of your choice and how you have a process put in place in order to make sure that that domain name doesn't end up transferring out of your control and into perhaps a competing business or a disgruntled employee or your website developer or your tech guy who decides that he's pretty angry after you fire him.
So the first order of business, control your registrant log in. You also need to use secure passwords for your registrant log in, because these registrant log in accounts can be hacked and we, as attorneys and lawyers handling these types of cases, we see all the time how someone actually hacked into our client's registrant account to control the domain name and is now trying to extort money in exchange for returning the domain name. So you don't want to become a victim of domain name extortion.
You need to make sure that the password is secure, that the password is complex, and that the password gets changed out on a regular basis.
The other way that you can end up losing your domain name for your business is if, in fact, someone registers the domain name similar to yours and starts cyber squatting or infringing your trademark by registration of a competing domain name.
So can you recover a lost domain name for your business? Absolutely you can, but the best thing is to make sure that you secure your domain names. Make sure that you don't lose them to disgruntled employees, partners, or tech people and make sure that you understand that if someone registers a domain name that is similar to yours, it doesn't even have to be identical, it can just be similar to yours, then you, if you have trademark rights, can use either the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy or the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act to potentially retrieve that domain name from the perpetrator and return it to your control.
My name is, domain name attorney, Enrico Shaffer. Today we were talking about how to recover a lost domain name for your business or company. Hope you learned something, and we'll see you next time.
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