What's in a name: sockii vs. sockii

[nicpel]

Those who know me fairly well, know that I've used "sockii" as my on-line pseudonym since...almost the first days that I was active in on-line communities in the mid-1990s. In particular, I've used it since I first opened Sockii's A-Team Homepage going back to 1995, and when I launched Sockii Press that same year to publish fanzines - and later registered the SockiiPress domain for web hosting. So I'm pretty darn attached to the name; people call me by it in real life at fannish gatherings, conventions, on multitudes of messageboards and websites - hell, I had it shouted at me by Stewart Copeland at a Police concert once!

Now, being a web writer/artist/etc interested in search engine ranking (as most of us are), I pretty regularly vanity search both my real name and sockii to see what comes up if, say, random web user looks me up. And recently when I did this for sockii, I became a bit bummed to see that there's apparently some mobile app developer in Australia by the name of Sockii now.

I guess mostly I'm kicking myself for never registering sockii.com as a domain for myself...but I'm thinking of grabbing sockii.org and/or sockii.info just for the heck of it at this point (if not already reserved). I also have a slight bit of concern wondering if these other Sockii people - even if they only seemed to get started in 2011 - would ever give ME hassle for the name I've been using for now over 15 years as my own "brand identity"?

Hmm. I wonder if it's getting any legal advice on the matter, just to be on the safe side...

Comments

[thalassatx]

I'd def get Sockii.org, maybe .info too. I dunno about the legal advice. It might be more expensive than it's worth.