Damn Bodog Legal Dept

[bodoglifepoker.com]

Originally Posted by kaus

I got a nice reply back from them and they said followed by q uote that affiliates are not allowed to own any domain or run a PPC campaign with anything related to the trademarks of bodog...so this guy was nice about it and offered to buy them back at cost

Im willing to pay double

[hoursurfing]

Just give it to them. It's in their T&C's and they're tight about that. Not worth jeopardizing your earnings over it.

They did it to me a couple years ago, and even though the domain was producing players I just gave it to them after reading the agreement. Funny thing was...they started using the domain in PPC ads on Google.

[Bryan]

Ya, this is definitely a case of not wanting to lose affiliate income from them and not a legal issue otherwise there would be no AppleInsider.com or any other blog or website using company names or products in their url's.

Legally do you have to give em up? No, but in the best interest of your affiliate account it's probably the right choice if you're making decent money each month.

Bryan

[Darko]

yea this all sounds normal - try and get cheapmicrosoftsoftware.net or bestsonytv.com etc etc - they too will send simular letters

[Justin]

Can't really blame them for wanting to have some control over their brand. With so many shitty 888 and Party banner farms out there, Im sure man casual web users dont really understand that the poker sites dont own these portals that are promoting them.

[Graham]

I have to agree with Bodog on this one. If they stipulate in their ToS that this is not allowed, then its NOT allowed. I always check with a site before registering a domain with their URL in it. I have some domains with the site name in the URL, but I don't really agree with it and think that most affiliate departments should not allow this.

[Randy]

I think this situation happens to a lot of affiliates. (I dealt with lawyers from two companies about domains I owned.) Learn a lesson from the situation and move forward. You can make a fortune in this business and never infringe on someone else's trademark.

[Jeremy]

I also learned my lesson many years ago. I think I had RolexPoker at one point and a few playboy domains. Of course there were also the WSOP ones that I had for some time.

Anymore I would never register another trademark unless I checked first. I too can't really blame the rooms for wanting to protect their brand. Plus you can achieve almost the same thing with subdomains or folders.

[Georgia Poker]

Back in the day I owned partypokercomps.com and ran it with their permission. Out of the blue they told me to shut it down (after my AM left). I tried to put up a fight but at the end of the day, I didn't want to lose my player base there on MGR. So it was definitely not a fight worth fighting.

[SunPoker.com]

I read an article on SEOmoz today about DSW shoe company suing an online retailer of its shoes (Zappos.com) because some of Zappos' affiliates are infringing on DSW's trademark. Some sites they say infringing are sites with DSW in the domain name.

DSW Sues Zappos.com for Trademark Infringement Over Affiliates' Review Sites


I thought it would be of interest to poker affiliates who have sites using other trademarked names.

Mark