Its like 3 am and I am very very tired right now. So I will attempt to write in my proper 5th grade grammar and do some bloggin!
Today was a fun day. The first of the month means cash money time! Yay! So today when I went to the local post office to check my P.O. Box to get all them checks, I got a nice little letter from Xanga.Com’s lawyers telling me that my sites www.xangaloser.com and www.xanga-layouts.info are copyright infringements against “Xanga”. This is the same type of letter that many people got and where worried about from MySpace.Com. I never got one and I have 10 plus domains with the word “MySpace” in the domain name. Xanga.Com wants me to send them the domains so that know one else will get confused between the sites.
So tomarow I have the fun job of talking to my lawyer briefly and then giving the kind people at Xanga.Com to hopefully sort some stuff out. I will explain to them that my sites only make me about $8 a week and only get 300 uniques a day. Hopefully they will understand and not waste anymore hard earn money on me. I have took some pictures and will attach them below 
I have been hard at work copying and pasting like crazy these last few hours, I have been adding to all my unused domain names a landing page with some ads on them so that I might be able to make some money off the unused domains. I have about 15-20 unused domains, and now all of them have ads on them. I have been running some landing pages on about 4 key domains I have. So far I have made $2 in about 5 days. At that rate it will make me about $150 a year, lol. So we will see how adding these 10 more domains will help.
An example is here - Domain Parking
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Interesting, I will be interested in seeing how that works with you and your attorney. Was going to do the same technique with another company.
“Buy Tree Hut Products” lol
Xanga has the right to protect their trade mark, but their claim that you are “intercept and siphon off” their traffic is very silly.
By the way, have you received the email I sent to developerhut at gmail dot com? Is there another address I should use?
Hey,
I’d recommend you just give them the domain. Its their property and its not like its making you a lot of money.
The reason they sent you a C&D letter is not because they think their visitors may get confused. Its because they need to protect their trademark. If they don’t protect it, they can lose it. A similar situation would be with Xerox, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#Trademark_issues_and_name_usage .
Just my $0.02. I don’t think they are trying to intentionally be assholes, just trying to protect themselves.
Be careful when dealing with them. I suggest you take a look at http://www.nissan.com for a little exercise in attempted domain stealing!
Also, do not tell them, “For $xxx.xx I’ll sell it to you because then they will take you to court for cyber-squating!
I’m thinking your best bet is to do as you are doing. Tell them how much money you make per month and your traffic levels. Just be wary of any money talk…
Can you let us know what your laywer says?
Interesting idea on the ad spots for unused domains. I should do that, too.
I got a C&D from myspace once and I didn’t even have the word Myspace in my domain. I was buying selling bulletins (which is against their TOS) and they told me to shut it down or see them in court. Needless to say I shut it down.
Good Luck
I’m interested in what your lawyer has to say on the issue.
I checked our drunkloser.com, I thought the google TOS says that you have to have content on a site to put ads on it? Or did you get past that by saying ’site coming soon’?
“coming soon” is not content
Coming soon is good enough content for me
Ok, I will tell everyone what the lawyer says
lol, interesting… im curious how it will end with the Xanga question.. keep us updated
It may be good enough content for you, but Google makes the final call and they aren’t going to like it.
Everyone - I was to bust to talk to my lawyer. I will do it later today. I will keep everyone posted
Also, the domain name parking has made me $0.35 yesterday. Yay!
I also thought that Adsense required some kind of actual content on the site in their TOS. Anyhow… maybe you could get into the Adsense for Domains program: http://www.google.com/domainpark/
so will i get in trouble for having Myspace in my domain name???
Sorry but that looks like bullshit to me. Are you sure it’s legit?
I used to get a TON of C&D’s from domains like that, I never bothered to reply back to a single one. Why? Because fuck them. Did they sue me? Nope, never. Why not? Because their threats are done to try and scare you into settling quickly with no trouble. Do you really think they want news to get out of a site named “xangaloser”? Or worse yet, get any press interested in looking into the company and giving them a bad rep for being an MLM scheme that would potentially damage their image and spiral into a controversial event all over some small domain that was clearly not owned or operated by them. I think not buddy. Keep the domain, and get yourself a whois protection so they don’t contact you again and be on your way.
Did you give it to them?