Note that this blog is the personal opinion of Steve Winter based upon his experiences.
Imagine your commercial website held hostage because of incompetent management at godaddy / wildwestdomains on behalf of a malicious frivolous DMCA complaint about obvious "fair use" posting.

I felt this a matter of civic duty to share with you what happened to us.   Early on we noticed reseller ratings using our copyrighted name to provide reviews and didn’t think a lot of it.  We ended up subscribing to their service because, in their words, it was the price of a pizza.  So for many months we paid their $29 a month and put their ratings blurb on our site (we had 10/10 their top rating and everything seemed to be going well.    Then they sent an email saying they were increasing the price to $199 a month.  We immediately cancelled and simply posted some of the material that they were publishing about us on our website clearly stating that it was being posted as “fair use”.  We merely reposted what they were publishing about us.   Is that not textbook “fair use”?

Then a few days later we got a notice from Godaddy that our commercial website http://www.sellcom.com was being blocked because of a copyright complaint from one Lara Michaels of reseller ratings.  Sure enough our website had been blocked by incompetent trash at the Godaddy copyright dept even though the materials we had posted were simply screen shots of what reseller ratings had published about us!

We had been paying the scum at reseller ratings ignorantly for years.  Needless to say we moved all of our hosting away from godaddy because of their blatant incompetence. I may post some of the details but the godaddy policy gave me two choices 1. remove the disputed material or 2. remove the disputed material.  That is NOT what the DMCA states according to the wiki.   My statement that the materials were fair use met the legal standard, not to mention that there were no grounds for godaddy to block our site and then extort compliance with their whim based upon their blatant incompetence regarding the DMCA.  I could not believe that those scum were actually blocking our commercial website.  It was really cute too that their email claimed that they don’t take sides in copyright disputes!  If this has not happened to you then you cannot imagine the feeling.   You are put out of business unless you comply with draconian incompetence!  Your website AND your domain is being held hostage by incompetent scum at godaddy / wildwest!

Now here is the real rub.  The scum at resellerratings have a business model of publishing registered trade names, copyrighted names of businesses etc without the permission of the owners and often against their will.   In what appears now to be little more than an extortion racket subscribers get preferred treatment regarding negative comments in that you can do something BEFORE it goes public.  Now would the correct term be extortion or blackmail for that sort of thing?

Anyway I did some research and if your trademark or copyrighted name is being published without your permission by reseller ratings, here is the link where you can file a DMCA copyright complaint against them.

http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/AWSAbuse

I hope this helps someone!
Steve Winter

UPDATE 11-15-2011 Dave at reseller ratings has sent us a legal threat regarding this blog.  Looks like those scum are not so big on free speech when it is their service being discussed.