A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

Other e-commerce legislation

Sparrow (2000) identified eight areas of law which need to concern online marketers. 

Although laws have been refined since that time, this is still a useful framework.

1  Marketing your e-commerce business

Sparrow used this category to refer to purchasing a 

domain name

 for a website, but other 

legal constraints now also fall under this category.

A  Domain name registration

Most companies are likely to own several domains, perhaps for different product lines, coun-

tries or for specific marketing campaigns. Domain name disputes can arise when an indi-

vidual or company has registered a domain name which another company claims they have 

the right to (see Chapter 3).

A related issue is brand and trademark protection. Online brand reputation management 

and alerting software tools offer  real-  time alerts when comments or mentions about a brand 

are posted online. Some basic tools are available including:

● 

Googlealert (

www.googlealert.com

) and GigaAlerts Google Alerts (

www.googlealert.

com

) which will alert companies when any new pages appear that contain a search phrase 

such as your company or brand names.

● 

Copyscape (

www.copyscape.com

) is used for locating duplicates of content that may 

arise from plagiarism. Blog Pulse (

www.blogpulse.com

) gives trends and listings of any 

phrase (see example in Figure 4.9) and individual postings can be viewed.

Domain name

The domain name refers 

to the name of the web 

server and it is usually 

selected to be the same 

as the name of the 

company.

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