According to this story on DomainNameWire.com, Manny Ramirez is going to UDRP aribitration to try to get back the expired domain MannyRamirez.com.

The backround appears to be that Manny switched agents a few years ago, but the intellectual property didn't go with him, and expired. The domain was then registered by a third party.

UDRP is an expensive way to try to get a domain back, and it doesn't always work. When are agents and players going to start taking their intangible assets seriously?

Avantla.COM provides tools and services to help avoid precisely this type of situation. Athletes and agents can have detailed tracking of all intellectual property including domains, social media accounts, websites, blogs, etc.

The Orange County Register (our local paper) ran an article about former Angels' broadcaster Rex Hudler today. The point of the article? Who owns his facebook page? He doesn't:

“I guess there’s someone out there pretending to be me,” Hudler said.

Apparently someone posted so content that was as "classy" as Rex would like.

"We probably should get a real Facebook account going pretty soon."

In Rex's defense, he does seem to own: RexHudler.com.  But the Twitter account "RexHudler" isavailable for the taking (as of today).

 

About Avantla: We help agents help their clients make sure their online brand and intellectual property are properly protected. If your clients need help, feel free to send us an email.

 

The NFL Players association recently bought the domain for $25,000 according to DomainNewsWire.com

Sean Miller wrote a great article on TheHill.com. It re-iterates how important it is for politicians to take their online intellectual property seriously:

“You’ve got to get your domain name registered early, long before
you consider running for office”
--  Democratic Web strategist based in Oregon.

At Avantla, we provide tools to help local, state, and national parties track and monitor domains, social media and other online trademarks for all their candidates. We help make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Read the full article here.

It's a little known fact that "Happy Birthday To You" is the "most sung" song in the world. You rarely hear it on television or in movies, because of the copyright. Right?

Well it turns out that the copyright for "Happy Birthday to You" isn't as clear as it seems. There's a long history to it. But the song is missing a copyright renewal, and the original authorship is questionable. Find out more here.

By now you've heard of the new "Tea Party". This is probably in spite of the terrible job they're doing on social media. Ron Callari at InvestorSpot.com wrote an incredible blog entry on the Tea Party -- he really digs into the details of the Twitter, Facebook, domain presence, etc. To sum up the big tea party convention:

"For such a large event that draws on people who like to hear the sound of their own voice, one would think they would have a significant presence on Twitter and Facebook."

At Avantla, we've seen the same thing with the major political parties. We did an analysis of all recent California candidates for local offices for both major parties. The result? Over 100 did not own the domain name for the politician: "FirstLast.com". And we found quite a few "Last.com" type domains available.

What does this ...

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You may recall last year's lawsuit in which NBA player Chris Bosh was awarded nearly 800 "athlete" domain names from a cybersquatter.

The award was about 4 months ago. So what happened to those domain names?

Well, I ran some internet tools against the published list of domains and can came up with these interesting statistics:

• There were originally 754 domain names awarded. I extracted the names out of this PDF document.
   
• Chris Bosh's company, Max Deal Technologies, and his lawfirm, Winston & Strawn LLP, still appear to have 596 domains registered.
   
• Only about 26 domains were transferred to someone else. These are domains like SteveNash.com and ScarlettJohanssonReynolds.com. This means that, as far as I can tell, only about 3.4% of the names have been returned the rightful owner.
   
• The remaining 162 were just "dropped". They're expired and unregistered. The domains are either of little ...

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I authored a guest post that was published on EntertainmentAgentBlog.com.

Pre-Greenlight Internet Branding For Films And Television

These are tips for telvision and movie producers on how to handle online presence before greenlighting a project.

My New Years resolutions have to do with computer security this year...

1. I will change ALL my passwords at least once per year. In January, for example. Specifically, I will be sure to change my personal and business passwords for all computers and websites that I use: PC's, Websites, banking, investments, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
 

2. I won't use the same password on all sites. The tech news this year detailed numerous cases where hackers compromised millions of passwords. If you use similar logins and passwords on many sites, you may be vulnerable to these types of hackers. The hackers will try the same passwords on other sites. Even if you you use two or three passwords (one for the most important banking sites, for examples), but this isn't really good enough.
 

3. I won't use easy to guess passwords: This happened to Sarah Palin. The ...

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I just read an interesting article about a cyber-squatter who goes after the domain names of up-and-coming politicians.

Seems no one is immune, but nowadays politicians need to be much more savvy. For a politician, it's especially bad because political opponents are sometimes the ones doing the squatting.

According to another article, the body that governs protection of domains names, WIPO, may not allow using UDRP to recover a politicians domain name. To quote from the article:

"The protection of an individual politician's name, no matter how famous, is outside the scope of the policy since it is not connected with commercial exploitation"

If you're thinking of running for office: After you get the best possible domain, be sure you've acquired all the social networking accounts for your name.

Voters will be looking for you online to learn more about your positions. And your opponents will ...

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