If you use your domain, consider registering your trademark

Monte: Okay. Now number five, try to be reasonable.

Stephen: I know it’s the stupidest suggestion there is and yet in some ways it makes the most sense. Everyone is out there to make money. All of this comes down to negotiations. No one wants to be taken and nobody really wants to get into a lawsuit. As far as I’m concerned, my job is to stop people from getting into lawsuits or to get them out of them as inexpensively as possible. Somebody comes up they say I’m going to file suit against you unless you give me this domain for free. Well they’re not being reasonable. You obviously have invested in the domain. Insurance – say, this domain is important to me but it’s not important to me to the point of spending $100,000 on litigation. Why don’t you give me $10,000 and I’ll go away? Something like that. I mean this is a negotiation process. Don’t try and hold people up. Not only is it unreasonable but its wrong. It pisses them off. Once people are pissed off in a lawsuit, there’s no ending it even if you get to a reasonable settlement.

Monte: Alright, well that’s a good point. And you’re right. It’s such a simple thing but people sometimes get so tied up and you can’t see the forest through the trees sometimes when you get tied up with this type of stuff.

Stephen: We’re all in this for business and to make a living and nobody really needs to be sitting there screaming at somebody across the desk or running into court or spending money on attorneys when it’s just not necessary.

Monte: Right, and you’re other point.

Stephen: My sixth point pertains to trademarks. If you’ve got a really important domain then use the domain, use the domain as much as possible and get a trademark for that use. Trademarks are not that expensive.

Monte: Talk about the expense a little bit just so people realize what it costs to file and the wait time and all that stuff. I remember when we did it for moniker I think we had to wait six months for our trademark to be approved and I can’t recall how much it was to pay for it. Give us an idea.

Stephen: You’re talking, if you’re using an attorney, the application can cost you about $835 which isn’t that much. The government filing fees are a lot less than that. We charge $500 for our fees which is really only and hour and a half worth of work.

Monte: Well you’re an expensive date.

Stephen: Absolutely.

Monte: But you’re good at what you do.

Stephen: I like to think so. You can even file for state trademarks. State trademarks don’t help you when it comes to WIFO but they help you everywhere else. WIFO really doesn’t accept state trademarks as being valid because they’re not reviewed. Often times you can get a state trademark that is one syllable different from someone else’s.

Monte: So they’re mainly concerned, or they’re, the thing that brings a lot of weight with the bad, a heavy bat is a federal trademark in that case.

Stephen: Absolutely. Don’t think just US. There’s Benolux trademarks. There’s community trademarks and there’s trademarks for just about every single country in the world. And in all honesty if turn around and you start looking at some of the countries around the world where their money is worth an awful lot less, you’re going to get a trademark very inexpensively. In the day and age of the internet, go to Eastern Europe, go to Africa. It doesn’t really matter. You’ve got a federal trademark. It gives you some validity before the WIFO board.

Monte: Okay so in a WIFO case, having a federal trademark even in an international UDRP claim, it carries some weight.

Stephen: Absolutely.