In past articles, I’ve spoken about the bastards that are known as cybersquatters, and how they not only go after domain names that either are exact to or similar to an existing company name. I’ve also ranted about their little bastard cousins known as “socialsquatters” who perform the same acts with user names on social networking accounts. One of the most devastating social networking account user names to not own as your exact company name is Youtube; therefore, I stress the importance of getting the account name back on any of your businesses that will be doing video promotions.

Contacting Youtube to Report a Squatter

Much like contacting Google, it’s really hard to figure out how to contact Youtube. They make you jump through hoops if you click the “contact” link. In short, you’ll never find it through there (believe me, I’ve tried for a half hour once) – you’ll just get dragged through pages and pages of FAQs and other nonsense. If you’re looking to dispute a cybersquatter that has registered Youtube.com/YourName, you’ll have to do it through the Youtube Legal Issues Form. As the form says, this is the best way to file a claim; better than doing so by snail mail or fax.

Click through two descriptive pages, then click “trademark” from the link list, and you’ll get to the form itself. Here, you’ll have to fill out the trademark owner’s name (hopefully, that’s you), address and contact information, along with the ID# of your registered trademark. When describing the issue at hand, you’ll really want to play up the fact that this name has been intentionally cybersquatted. Mention your company’s life span. Hopefully your company has been around before the cybersquatter took your user name…otherwise, you might run into a roadblock. State the date that your trademark was registered, and when it was first used in commerce. Explain that this account is causing “commercial confusion” with the public. In other words, people are assuming the account in question is the official Youtube account of your company, when it is not.

At the end of the form, be sure to state that you want the account to be closed AND handed over to you. Otherwise, it will be gone forever, and that defeats the purpose.

If Youtube reviews everything and it all checks out, you’ll receive an email stating that the account has successfully been transferred and a temporary password has been assigned. This is the part where you can start doing the Cabbage Patch.

Above: The email confirming Youtube's transferal of a cybersquatted account to me.

The more of these things you have on your side, the better your chances of getting your username back will be:

• You own the registered trademark of the word, and it’s a “made-up” word (i.e., ‘Flarg’ instead of ‘MotorcycleVideos’)
• The socialsquatter hasn’t done anything with the account beyond registering the user name, making it blatantly obvious that the intent was to squat it
• The account you’re trying to gain ownership of was squatted a long time ago, and the account has no activity on it in months or years

What If You Don’t Own a Registered Trademark?

If none of this was helpful to you because you only have a lowly “implied trademark,” it’s never too late to register a trademark for your online presence. Seriously, the benefits far outweigh that $500 fee, especially when fighting these cybersquatting pricks! It’s really easy to do, too. I did it on my own, but services like Legalzoom’s online trademark service will do all of the grunt work for you.

If the Youtube username you desire has been taken by a squatter, or someone who registered it years ago and has never logged in since then, you’re out of luck. Youtube never releases squatted or suspended usernames – EVER…even though they claim that it happens within 6 months of the action taken. The only way to get one is to register a trademark, be patient through the registration process (usually 1 full year) and attempt to write Youtube using your trademark serial number as your saving grace.

Otherwise, you can always resort to “Youtube.com/mysitedotcom” (note the “dot com” spelled out at the end), I’ll promise not to make fun of you, though.

1. The video you’ve dropped on your sales page is watermarked with someone else’s URL, or has a promotion at the end of it. This is why it is SO important to watch the entire video you intend to use, BEFORE you put it on your live site. Otherwise, you’re enticing people to visit that other guy’s site. You know, the guy who went through all of that trouble to create the video in the first place, giving him more credibility than you.
2. Youtube videos are click-able, as you know, and clicking one will take you to its respective page on Youtube. If that page has the video author’s link pointing to his or her affiliate site, you’ve just lost a sale. The instant someone moves away from your site and onto another site with a link to further information about the product as seen in the video is the point where you’ll either lose the cookie or the sale.
3. Some Youtube videos are just malicious by their own nature. Some videos have a curse word, image or wind up having a completely different turn of events during the last few seconds — I’ve seen it a million times! Nothing will KILL your credibility more than using a video that you scanned for 5 seconds that has something really embarrassing in it.

Watch all videos from Youtube in their entirety before you use them…can’t stress that enough!