Heads They Win Tails you Lose

So was I being overly dramatic about our friend Mr Small Businessman yesterday, his closeness to the abyss. Maybe, maybe not. Call me cautious but if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck then maybe, just maybe it IS a duck. In case you’re on a parallel plain, geese honk, there’s a difference.

Moving on from yesterday, the website developer doesn’t have an obligation to hand anything over to his ‘client’ because it’s all in his name UNLESS Mr Small Businessman fronts up to the Domain Name Commission pleading an Evidence of Unfair Registration case and citing 5.1.2. Circumstances demonstrating that the Respondent is using the Domain Name in a way which is likely to confuse, mislead or deceive people or businesses into believing that the Domain Name is registered to, operated or authorised by, or otherwise connected with the Complainant.

The fact that Mr currently sitting-in-front-of-me Small Businessman didn’t think to check back with the website developer about HIS business’ IP is quite damning to me of his ignorance of its importance. IP is an element of value in and to his business.

Put simply, IP = $’s when you sell the business. IP is part of your Exit Strategy, it puts a dollar figure to all your hard work of creating and developing business systems and strategies. All the nut’s and bolts that make your business work, your under the hood stuff that people take forgranted. Still, at least he does have some recourse when he finally realises there’s a darker side to the smoke and mirrors scenario.

“IP means any patent, registered design, copyright (including rights in software), design right, database right, trade mark, service mark, domain name, rights in confidential information and all similar property rights anywhere in the world in each case whether registered or not and including any …”

To begin with, Mr Small Businessman believes he owns his website though he doesn’t currently hold the domain name rights. Not-good. Nothing sinister in that I suppose because anyone can be a registrant BUT he doesn’t know the person I tell him is designated as the owner of the domain name. Again, not-so-good.

The scenario has all the ingredients of a Horror film. The ignorance gives us the gory element, it’s got suspense, it has a freaky guy (plural in this case) and confusion till the end. To cut a long story short, the previous owner and a couple of his friends aka the website developer and his mob, brought the Top Level Domain Name (TLDN). That’s the last part of an Internet domain name, that is, the group of letters that follow the final dot of any domain name. For example, in the domain name www.penneylaneonline.com, the top-level domain is com (or COM, as domain names are not case-sensitive).

So the website developer buys the .co.nz Top Level Domain Name using the same name as the business owned by across-the-desk-from-me Small Businessman’s. Now because Mr Small Businessman hasn’t bothered taking a look to see if his IP is in lock down, that is, he owns it. Enter my Nancy Drew alter ego.

The NZ Companies Offices show me in HD living colour that the former owner is in Liquidation And/Or Receivership or In Liquidation or In Receivership or In Statutory Management or Struck Off or Struck Off & In Voluntary Administration. Same goes for some of the members of the website developer team. There’s no excuse for ignorance.

So, as I sat across the desk from Mr Small Businessman I wondered if his knowing better now was beginning to have meaning for him. Across from him, I thought his house was still in darkness. I’m listening in my head now for the scary music, that way I can put my hands over my eyes before the ‘gore’ hits the screen! I don’t like Horror films.