You are a photographer, an artist, a sole proprietor. You chose a simple name for your business; your name. You wake up one day and a Chinese company want to sell you your own name as a internet domain; one which you already own but with a different ending. The dot com days of the internet are over as the ONLY label. We have many. Are they looking to expand their business by buying up possible names or are they looking to steal your work and allow anyone and everyone to buy your work from them?
What do you do? In an age where anything and everything posted on the web is open to security loop holes. Where stripping out ownership metadata is practiced by many of the social networking sites and accepted by many photographers and amateur photographers world wide.
Today is another day of internet protect of your product name. I recently have been asked to help re establish an internet site for a local musician. He failed to listen to me the first time and allowed a local web developer to BUY his domain name for him and then to set up a hosting for it. What the developer didn’t tell his client that he really owned the name of the business and the web site was a sub domain of his. This effectively blocked the musician from having control of his own web site. The developer also stole a logo design from a very well known business and sold it to that client as an original graphic. This put the musician in harms way when the piano based business was made aware of the infringement of their copyrighted logo.
Thieves and hacks are constantly looking to take your property. Beware brother, beware.