Dear Grassrootsmotorsports,

i had a half of dozen domain names i picked up when i was doing some marketing consulting for small businesses, on the side, awhile ago. i was contacted by "a small plumbing company" about one of them, and the owner just "had to have it." I didnt have a good feeling about it, but he offered me a fair deal and eventually i caved and sold it to him , i think it was $100 or so... (the company i originally secured it for went belly up leaving me stuck, and unpaid) two months later he sold it again for "an undisclosed amount" to a very large company... the bastard was domain name broker of some sort...probably made 10 grand of it by lying and cheating his way through it...

worst part, they never even used it...

Tim Baxter wrote: I'm not going to give Salanis' dad a hard time. It's one thing to hold onto a domain you have a good reason to own, even if you're not doing anything with it. It's another thing entirely to snag up thousands of domains and hold them for ransom. The latter, in my mind, is pretty close to extortion.

Agreed. My last name is the same a a few prominent businesses in the area. Had I snagged it because I someday wanted to make a family photo album or something, then they would be out of luck. First come, first serve.

The one I want for my business is taken, not used, and not available for sale. What's up with that? A competitor just making my life difficult?

If it is really a cybersquatter, you can pull the domain from them for a little legal work. I have a friend that is quite knowledgeable in this area and he mentioned once that you have to show you do business under that name and a few other things and they will go right down.

GregTivo wrote: I'm sure there's people sitting on pretty much every 3 letter acronym. Can any tell me how often you have to renew domain names? You don't just get it for life do you?

You have to renew them when they expire. You can sign up for one year or a decade, depends on how much you want to front. And when it does expire, the current owner gets the chance to renew it before it gets released. So once you have a domain, it's secure unless you're squatting on a legitimate business name as Hess explained.

One of our competitors was called "Stage One Tuning", stageonetuning.com. So I bought stagetwotuning.com to pull their chain :) After all, everyone knows that stage 2 is an improvement on stage 1. They thought it was pretty funny.

www.stageeleventytuning.com here I come

The Brown Stig wrote: Firefox lets you save if you hit "Save and Quit" Just go back to the GRMenu and save and quit. If you don't have FireFox, I understand why you can't figure the "favorites" issue as well!

get a Mac .... then all you have to do is bookmark it .... end of problem

Umm, you can bookmark things on a PC too...

Keith wrote: One of our competitors was called "Stage One Tuning", stageonetuning.com. So I bought stagetwotuning.com to pull their chain :) After all, everyone knows that stage 2 is an improvement on stage 1. They thought it was pretty funny.

I used to work for a prominent international intellectual property law firm. A significant case came down relating to the use of berkeleyXXXX.com, where XXXX was the name of a large company. (The owner was a disgruntled customer with an axe to grind.)

I looked and discovered that berkeley[name of my old firm] wasn't taken, so I registered it. I mentioned to a few of the partners that I was going to put up a similar site for disgruntled associate attorneys at the firm. They didn't think it was funny.

Of course, I never did put up such a site, and I transferred the domain to them (free of charge) when I resigned three years later. They've since let it lapse.