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As you are developing your Internet Brand, the last thing you want to see is competitive companies spawning websites with similar names in order to take advantage of your business. Even if your company name and brands are trademarked, there are steps you can take to protect your domains from internet piracy. While trademark and intellectual property laws make it illegal in the U.S. to register domain names that attempt to capitalize on trademarked words and phrases, it is almost always more cost effective to preempt such problems on the front end rather than pursue litigation later. One way to protect yourself is to register similar or alternative domains to your brand and company name.
Top Level Domains
One of the easiest things to do to protect your domain name is to register the same domain name in the various top level domains (TLDs) or extensions, for example .com, .net, .cc, .org. Typically, this means that you should own the domain name with all of its suffixes (.com, .net, .org, .cc). The ownership of the .com name is the most critical in the current environment, even if your primary domain name utilizes another extension. Depending on your specific situation, secondary domain extensions such as .biz, .info, .cc, .tv, may also be worth registering as well.
Brands
Aside from your company name, you may want to protect the product name and other brand names used in your business by registering them as well. An example of this would be Procter & Gamble registering Tide.com, Charmin.com, Always.com and Downy.com, to name a few. It's notable however, that some of the company's other brands, like Bounce and Bounty, do not have their own .com domain counterparts, presumably because someone else got to them first.
Common Mispellings
If your domain name can be easily misspelled, registering variants of the spelling may help to ensure that your visitors can find your site. For example, the weekly computer magazine, Computor Edge, has also registered ComputerEdge.com.
Additional online resources on this topic include:
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