In case you haven’t seen the headlines, Verizon just won a 33 million dollar lawsuit against OnlineNic for registering trademarked domain names – according to articles published on the web, these include – myverizonwireless.com, iphoneverizonplans.com and around a million others relating to all kinds of popular brand names. 

For those of you who think this is not relevant to affiliate marketing, think again.  Verizon claimed that showing competitve ads on these pages was defrauding the public, and well, cybersquatting.  That means, if you think you’re going to buy a brand name and turn it into a landing page or redirect as part of googles adsense or some other affiliate program, you might want to check the fine print before you end up as part of one of the lawsuits.  Brand names can be a very sticky situation, because you’re not the trademark holder. 

Btw, this doesn’t only happen to big guys.  Yours truly recently received a letter in the mail demanding a domain name be turned over immediately to it’s “owner” because of trademark infringement.  I had been a member of said company’s affiliate program, and, the worst part was, the domain didn’t even make a profit, so i stopped using it and turned off the auto-renew.  

Just a warning to all of you affiliate marketers!!

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