1st Naughty America, Now Nasty Dollars...

Polish arisocrat will have to give up an even bigger bunch of domains..

And I will probably have to give up most of all Damnnnnnnnnn

I will answer my own question because there was no money in it for them years ago when maybe there was less than 50 domains if that with their trademark in them. it's strictly greed not protecting shit.. if you want to lie to yourself be my guest but anyone with a clue knows the real reasoning behind this move.

Would have been nice to have been told this 8 years ago when I was registering 50+ domains specifically to promote them.

Doing this now is really bad form.

Which email address did it come from V Rocks? I set up most of their promo emails etc to go directly into my spam folder.

I would think that they either didn't have their stuff trademarked at the time and/or didn't fully understand the laws. I can tell you this much...since piracy has all but destroyed the business, myself and many others started learning a lot more about copyright and trademarks.

It's just my opinion but I don't think that NA or ND has any "evil" intentions. I think that they are doing what things that they SHOULD have done long ago but didn't worry about. Now that all this thieving and piracy has taken place, everybody is starting to dot their "i"s and cross their "t"s getting ready for what's coming.

Unfortunately it means policing the trademark.

Either that, or they are all just evil monsters who waited patiently for webmasters to build an empire that they could then ransack.

No matter what any of us believe...bottom line is this: the days of squatting domains that are trademarked without the trademark owner coming after you are over. As I said earlier...that's a blow for folks who have made a living off of that type of promotion.

Can someone please be so kind and post the actual email?

read what you are typing, domains that promote their sites arent hurting them one bit. they are making them sales. you are off base man. it's the people stealing their content or promoting other sites with their trademarks who should be shit canned. not the honest hard working webmasters who are doing legit work for their program.

You make no sense saying this piracy issue. nothing is being stolen. you argument does not hold any water at all. if we where talking about domains with tubes with their content on them then you would have a point but that is not the case.

well if they wanted the domains so bad they should of registered them ages ago they knew before anyone else what their site names would be and what domains they where using for their sites. they had the money for reg fees. it's bullshit

so since they didn't do anything about their content being stolen the honest webmasters who put hard work promoting them and building up backlinks and traffic to their sites should be punished for it. that seems real fair.

blame it on the tubes. thats the normal status quo if there is any issue. just like it was a rogue ex employee. this biz can make you sick at times.

if they want to spend money on lawyers going after domains why don't they spend money and energy going after people stealing their content and the tubes? because they know who the easier target is and they will blackball them and hold over their head payments if they don't give up their shit. it's a fucked situation and anyone who says diff is an idiot.

a tube owner who has their content isnt promoting them anyways so they can't do shit except spend a bunch of money on lawyers and maybe not accomplish anything. this way they can win no matter what. I was born at night but not last night.

Robbie,

I ususally agree with 99.9 percent of your views and comments but I find it hard to in this instance.

Your comment "I would think that they either didn't have their stuff trademarked at the time and/or didn't fully understand the laws."

"If you have trademarked your site you MUST protect your trademark"

Most of these corps have had registered trademarks for years and good lawyers so they fully understand the value and importance of such ..they are not just now waking up to the facts.

It looks like many trademark holders (both mainstream and adult) simply ignored people registering them and sat back and watched webmasters build those domains into something of value ..( they can of course see how much value from the webmaster stats ) ...now they are mature $$$ earning domains its time for them to say " Hey those contain our trademark we want them for free...hand them over".

Yes its business and tough times ....so I agree they can now call in what may have been a master plan over many years of sitting and waiting .....and yes they have every right ......just sucks for those affiliates involved even if it is actually you could say thier own fault...

Bottom line is due to piracy and theft the adult industry has reached the "every man for himself " stage I think.

it's ruthless and nasty they knew what sites and domains they had in the works long before any affiliate knew. either reg every domain u want then or simply never let any webmaster reg a domain with any of your site name in it from the beginning. that's the only fair and just way. I wish more people had the balls to stand up against em and say get your lawyers and show that they did nothing for years and now suddenly they send out an email saying hand em over.. I think a fair judge would see the shadiness in this.

im still surprised they dont have anyone for in-house SEO, it probably hurts money-wise when you manage to rank 1st position in google for their websites ;-)

I wasn't saying THIS is a piracy issue. I was saying that NOW that piracy has done all this damage...many companies for the first time ever had to bring in their lawyers to begin trying to understand the DMCA laws.

Trust me, this was never much concern in the old days.

We mostly all had lawyers to fight the govt. I certainly didn't understand the importance of trademark and what it will mean when all of this piracy is finally laid to rest by new laws that will catch up with technology.

That's all I'm saying. We now all have lawyers telling us to actively protect trademarked domains. That was never the case before. In the past we only were concerned with staying out of jail. lol

I hope that makes more sense. I can't speak for NA or ND. I'm only giving you an educated guess based on what I've been instructed to do by attorneys about my trademarks and what the importance of a properly maintained trademark is going to mean in the future in the battle against piracy.

I wasn't meaning to infer that current affiliates who are domain squatting were responsible for anything like that at all. And I sympathize with their plight. But as I said, it's business. I'm just glad I always built my own sites (tgps) and never promoted using that method.

I will take a total guess here but would imagine having thousands of webmasters covering the top rankings and paying them a commission is cheaper,faster and more cost effective overall....hence thats why the affiliate model grew so big as it did or programs would have simply done everything inhouse.

There was nothing in their affiliate T&C's when I signed up to their program in 2002 that said I couldn't register domains containing their site names, every smart affiliate knew the value of that back in the day. It's still important to this day of course on some search engines.

It seems unjust that they are now retroactively trying to impose this new ruling. If they want some of my "choice" domains now, I'll ask for some reasonable compensation, or they can send me some legal documents and I'll take down links to their sites from every site I have them on, stop promoting them, and urge everyone else to do the same.

Program owners should remember the value of affiliates, without us, your brands may never have taken off, you may have only made a tenth of your total sales. To fuck us over is a daft business practice.