[thelist] Hosting and DNS Registrations - UPDATE

[Sharon F. Malone]

Vic and Martin (and anyone else interested in this thread)

I've done some research on the discussion we had about a week ago ... and have provided a link below for you to read. The article is written by an internet law attorney.

The last item in the lefthand column and the last 2 items in the righthand column are the ones of interest: 1) Who Owns Your Domain Name?, 2) Who Controls Your Domain Name? and 3) What To Do If The Wrong Person Is Listed as the Owner of Your Domain Name. You can click on the right arrows for a more detailed discussion of each item.

http://www.keytlaw.com/urls/urllaw.htm

>From my read on this, it's really not a matter of preference, ethics, etc. It's a matter of law. Legally, the registrant (owner) of a domain name is the client, not the webmaster or anyone else. According to the article above, apparently many web designers have been registering themselves as the registrant as well as the Administrative, etc. contact. The article encourages folks to rectify this.

Hope this is helpful.

Best,
Sharon

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sharon F. Malone" <sfmalo at 24caratdesign.com>
> To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
> Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2002 5:11 AM
> Subject: Re: [thelist] Hosting and DNS Registrations
>
>
> > Had a question come up tonight about who is displayed (considered) as the
> owner of a domain and who is not when you do a search on whois.net
> >
> > In Network Solutions, when you do a search, NS is the registrar, the owner
> of the domain name appears as the "Organization" which would be the
> equivalent to the name and address info that first appears when the
> registrar is BulkRegister. My company's name and address, let's say, XYZ
> Consulting, should not be the name first appearing; it should be the
> client's name and address.
> >
> > Bear with me, please!!!! The person I was talking to said, no, if it's a
> BulkRegister scenario, it's perfectly alright to show my XYZ Consulting name
> and address, rather than the client's. I said, no, XYZ Consulting is simply
> representing the registrar and the owner/organization should reflect the
> client name and address information.
> >
> > Legally, who is right?
>
> By all rights the owner/organization should be shown as the registrant. XYZ
> may have purchased the domian on behalf of the registrant/owner, but XYZ
> does not own the domain, and therefore any reference to XYZ should only be
> as an Aministrative Contact...possibly as Technical Contact.
>
> This is probably more a matter of ethics, than legality...although I'm not
> fully qualified to say.
>
> Think about this:
>
> You build a site for a client. The client has bought and paid for your
> services, the right to use your custom-designed graphics on their site, etc.
>
> Whose Copyright information do you display on the clients site? Certainly
> not XYZs. At least I certainly wouldn't. I will include my company info in
> the meta tags.
>
> Vic
>
> > Sharon
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sharon F. Malone
"web design and Internet writing services"
http://www.24caratdesign.com
sfmalo at 24caratdesign.com