mrchris

hey guys,

really need some advice on this one.........

oki doki, one day i had what you would call a 'poor lack of judgement' and i purchased the following domains:
visacredit.co
visadebit.co
wait up before you roll your eyes and shake your head LOL's

after thinking about the mistake that i had made i decided to do the right thing and contact visa corporate to basically give them the domains for free to avoid any future issues which i dont want.
i made it very clear the i was not trying to sell them....just transfer to avoid trademark lawyers sending me evil letters.

after about 5-6 emails both visa and myself have stopped contacting each other and at no time did they request the domains even though this was my reason of contact.
I made things very clear and stressed that i wasnt after money and contact ended on a reasonable note with no angst or bargaining.

would it be safe to say that i am in the clear on this one seeing after doing a couple of trademark/copyright searches i didnt find that 'visacredit / visadebit' are trademarked by visa (straight from visa site)
And with the way things ended with visa not requesting the said domains after i basically handed it to them on a silver plate.

If so if they decide to come after me in the future, do i have a defense to keep the domains? seeing that I did offer to transfer everything over.

any help would be great.....


thanks for reading

zapdaddy

You contacting them and offering to transfer the names to them would be considered a self admission of acting in bad faith in regards to the visa trademark.

Just my opinion. I am not a intellectual property lawyer.

mrchris

so very very right!

as i said it was a very poor lack of judgment on my behalf and that's why i offered it to them on a silver plate.

i will never use the domains so i wanted to avoid any troubles.....but they didnt even ask for it or agree for me to transfer them.

i just dont want the domains associated with me seeing i try to be as honest as possible and i like to sleep at night without stress or worries.
sometimes i surprise myself with stupidity (understatement)

i had offers from some scammers and then i knew i was holding something pretty volatile and knew i just had to take the leap into the beasties mouth.

dont really think it takes a lawyer to tell me how stupid i was D'Oh!

i bet your shaking your head right now....dont blame you

zapdaddy

I don't think you have anything to be overly concerned with.
Just stating that if they do ever want the names. Their case would be easy to make.
I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Let them drop and forget about it.

CCTLDS

It doesn't matter if Visacredit or Visadebit are not trademarked by Visa.Both have the "Visa" mark incorporated.Therefore,you can have problems using the domain names.
However,I didn't understand what Visa said.You said that at no time did they request the domain names,but what did they said in those emails ?
I suggest you to keep a copy of all the emails,in case something happens,so that you can prove you had no bad intentions .

Good Luck

mrchris

i have done that already.

the emails never mentioned that i wanted money.....quite the opposite, i did really stress this a few times.
funny thing is after doing a massive search it seems there are quite a few well established sites that have the same domain name(s).

well its a .co so i have no problem letting it expire when the time comes in a few months

thanks

CCTLDS

I'm glad you didn't had problems with these domain names.