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 mean for candidates? Two things, and both are bad:

First, California candidates aren't taking advantage of the search engines, since Google will give better search ranking to domains that exactly match the search -- the candidates name in this case.

Second, this is an opportunity for the candidates' opponents to grab up this valuable online real-estate. The first ammendment usually protects domains that are used for political purposes, so it's not cybersquatting.

If these candidates aren't getting their domains, what about their other intellectual property? Twitter? Facebook? We'll be publishing a full analysis for California soon.

In the "Internet Age", intellectual property is a key differentiator between the winners and losers. The parties that excel at acquiring and managing IP will have huge competitive advantages.

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 value or they're ready (unfortunately) for another cybersquatter to jump on them.

A couple of notes: I ran this analysis about 2 weeks ago, and things may have changes slightly. Also I can't guarantee there were no errors in my analysis, but the data is all publicly available, so feel free to check my results.

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.