Thread: being sued

If I own a domain for the next world cup can they sue me or something?

You wouldn't think so, if they could, MILLIONS of sites worldwide would be shutdown. Like live streaming places that broadcast Pay Per View events.

No, they could take your domain though, or send a DMCA letter telling you to stop using the domain or change the content.

Do you have any idea what you are talking about? No.

@ OP - you're likely just to get a C&D at which stage you should move offshore or hand over the domain. If you continue to infringe their trademark and profit from it, then they could come after you, but generally it is far too expensive for them to do this unless you are making bank.

Check the exact trademarking being used by the World Cup and create a variant to avoid the dreaded C&D letter.

I just remembered a friend of mine, an attorney by the way, who got sued by MLB for using the term "Subway Series" with logos on T-Shirts. They can be very protective if they want to.

Are you a dickhead? Yes.

It was pretty generally worded, just trying to give some input.

I'll ignore your first comment.

You shouldn't give people legal advice unless you know what you are talking about or have experience in the niche.

I was in live streaming for a while until a partner of mine ended up in court over it. So yes, they can get you if they want to, it's just that 99% of sites get ignored as it is time consuming to go after them all.

Alright, understandable. Guess I didn't fully understand the question. And I didn't give advice, my words were,

@OP - you can have issues depending on the trademarks, copyrights and such. Odds are you would just lose the domain name.

I had the domains superbowl2005.com and superbowl2009.com at one point and sold them to a travel agent back in 2004... made good money on the sale but I knew if I kept them that I could have problems.

I also owned the domain hugedeliverycompany.net and they sent me some very interesting correspondence telling me that if I didn't shut the site down they would start legal action.

That letter came delivered to my overnight by a guy in brown clothes driving a brown truck.

I shut the site down.

Hey OP,

I'm not the smartest cookie in the Jar when it comes to legal advice, but I will share a few experiences of mine and let you make your own judgement.

I have about three domains that I purchased about 3 hours after they expired - the previous website weren't officially trademarked, but their website was copyright obviously. They continued to ask for their domain back, but I didn't reply - I received one legal threat, and I didn't reply. I haven't heard from them since.

I had hosting in Germany, when it was previous in USA. I think the only difference is that the website wasn't "official" a registered trademark of anything - so they couldn't of possibly of done anything.

If you're using a registered trademark, then I would only assume they can take legal action - from my research, Google can if you were to by google.co - but the question is would they really want to.

I think you should go ahead with it anyway, and when you start receiving threats that's when you should hand the domain back over or something - but I will stress, I'm no expert!

I hope that helps!

All the best,
Lynn.