Two Cautionary Tales About Resources Important to Anyone Using a Domain Name or Website

1. Not renewing a domain name you want to keep

This warning is new, but the reason for forgetting to renew a domain name isn’t.

Today, a domain name is one of the most important digital assets a practice has, yet far too many practices still risk what happened in this story.

Domains are generally registered for periods of two to five years. During that time, people move on, email addresses are lost, IT support arrangements change, and contact details become outdated. The result is that domain renewal notices can fail to reach the person responsible for the domain.

If a domain expires and is subsequently deregistered, someone else can potentially take ownership of it.

In this case, a practice failed to renew its domain name on time. In the past, it was often possible to renew a domain after it had expired and everything would be OK. That is the part that has changed.

In this instance, GoDaddy took control of the domain after it mistakenly expired. That should still have been recoverable. But this time, the registrar would not allow the practice to renew the domain unless it paid almost $3,000 to ‘buy’ it back.

BEWARE. We have never seen this before. It appears to create a new potential income stream for domain registrars, so make sure you know where your domain records are held and keep a close eye on them.

2. Images used on a website without copyright authorisation

This has been an issue for the past two decades, but it has raised its ugly head again.

The issue concerns copyright ownership of images used on websites. Twice in the past few months, our clients have been contacted by a new player in this area called COPYTRACK.

On both occasions, COPYTRACK wanted our clients to pay several hundred dollars for alleged copyright infringement. While image copyright is important, in these particular cases, we believe the claims are most likely to be unfounded. Each time, the images in question were covered by our Getty Images subscription, which we maintain for our clients to help protect them from copyright infringement claims.

We know of others who have paid up to $2,500 per image to settle similar infringement claims.

In any case, always make sure your website developers are using images appropriately licensed for your use and that you have evidence of that authorisation. This can help protect you from unnecessary copyright claims.

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