Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Lately, Republican candidates are taking shots at Mitt Romney because in his private equity life he had some failures. Democrats have made no secret that they are going to go after Romney because in his private equity life, he had to shut down some unprofitable plants to save businesses. Heaven forbid, other businesses he invested in went belly up. I am not here to defend or advocate for any particular candidate, but I do think that Americans need a much better perspective on failure.
Why are we so hard on failure?
One of the things the start up community does is embrace failure. When a company goes under, you learn from it. I have invested after tax dollars that were hard to earn into many companies, and not all of them have worked out. One went belly up. One is marginal, one is on fumes, and the rest are operating, but like any company they have challenges. I have had some exits too. But, even those had many twists and turns along the way and the company could have gone under.
Being in business isn’t easy. It’s risky. If it were easy, we’d all leave our cushy government and corporate jobs and go on our own and start entrepreneurial companies. But, statistics show that fewer than 30% of all start up businesses make it ten years. Starting a business isn’t rocket science, but it’s a heckuva lot tougher. But, encouraging people to take that risk leads to gigantic gains for our entire society.
To give you a little perspective, you need to know what Romney engaged in. He was in what is called Private Equity (PE). Most people confuse Private Equity with Venture Capital (VC). Venture invests in newer companies that have a new technology. Private Equity invests in an existing company that has been operating and reinvents that company. Usually, PE firms use a lot of leverage (debt), to generate returns. Extra leverage on the balance sheet magnifies the rate of return if the company can afford the debt load. If the company can’t afford it, it either restructures again or goes bankrupt. The reason it’s called Private Equity is that the money for the fund comes from private sources, not government sources. The companies that the PE firm buy and run are not listed on public markets, but closely held. The big payoff for PE comes when they spin the companies back out into the open market through an IPO or acquisition. Private Equity firms take risk.

Can I buy a domain name that is the exact name of someone’s company or trademark?
I want to know if I can buy a domain name that is the name of an existing company but is a domain name that they havn’t claimed yet. If I was to register it (eg; www.microsoft.uk.org) would the company whoes name it is have any legal claim to the domain or would it be legally mine. Also, could I then use it to put adsense adverts on the website, being careful not to use any copyrited logos, emblems or trademarks, names, etc? Can I still write about the company (good things!) and spell out their name (eg, ‘ microsoft’) without fear of being sued, so long as I use a disclaimer to say that the site is not affiliated with that company and all trademarks belong to them, blah, blah? Many thanks! 🙂
I did find some info on the subject, but even this says it is a grey area. Basically, domain registras allow anyone the freedom to buy any domain name, yet there is nothing stopping a company from taking you to court for infringing on their copyright, especially if you are making money from it.
So what do we all think?