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One of the biggest problems for people who come into this industry is that they tend to become totally absorbed by us. At first glance this industry and the people in it look as though we can offer everything a newcomer needs to make money online.

We have webmaster boards, tutorials, sites that offer the latest industry news and much more. With so much information at hand newcomers stop looking beyond the borders of this industry for information. They forget that there are other great sources of relevant information out there beyond the adult marketing part of the Net and they lose touch with what's going on out there.

If that resonates with you then perhaps it's time to start looking beyond adult and one of the first places to explore is the world of the domainers ... those guys who buy and sell domain names for a living ... because you're going to pick up some valuable information. And it may just save your business sometime in the future.

Right now some of the discussion among domainers is focused on a ruling that was handed down last year by a court in Kentucky. It seems that Kentucky doesn't like the idea of online gambling ... not because they don't like gambling ... but because online gambling probably takes revenue away from gambling on horse races. As we all know the horse racing industry is important to Kentucky so I guess they wanted to do something to hobble online gambling.

So what they did was to get a court order that allowed them to seize around 141 domain names that were associated with online gambling. Some of the domain names they wanted to seize were merely parked domains while others were at the centre of the biggest online gambling sites in the world.

Now we should also remember here that online gambling is basically illegal in the United States but not in the rest of the world ... and certainly not even seen as vaguely shady in countries like the United Kingdom where many of these big gambling sites seem to have their headquarters.

But that wasn't seen as any sort of problem by the legal eagles in Kentucky ... they merely issued an order to every registrar of those 141 gambling domain names instructing the registrar to hand the domain names ... many of them .com domain names ... over to the State of Kentucky.

I guess that some registrars complied but registrars overseas ... and especially those in the United Kingdom ... felt that the Kentucky courts really had no jurisdiction outside of the United States. The overseas owners of those domain names didn't feel inclined to allow their domain names to be surrendered either so one of the biggest gambling sites located in the United Kingdom and with a .com domain registered through a registrar in the same country took the matter to court.

The State of Kentucky failed to appear before the court but even if it had the outcome would have almost certainly been the same ... and that outcome was that the case was thrown out. The English court in a ruling that has just been handed down found that any order made by the court in Kentucky could not be enforced because the type of forfeiture ordered by the Kentucky court... where no financial compensation was offered ... was not part of English law. That's interesting because US law is based on English law but that's only a side issue for us here in adult.

The real issue for us is that we need to protect our assets and each of our domain names is very much an asset for us and in this industry if you're not doing all you can to protect your assets then you're being very foolish.

While we work within the law we are constantly being pressured by people who are motivated by their religious beliefs and who want to use the law to shut us down. And right now we are under more pressure from those people than we have seen in a long time.

How long will it be before someone decides to test the law in one of the very conservative states and ends up with an order to seize adult related domain names? If that happens do you think that any of the registrars in the United States will challenge the ruling?

What will you do and what will happen to your business if your domain names are seized?

Of course it may never happen but it's a gamble and when it's your business that's at stake can you really afford not to take steps to protect your business and its assets? It's definitely something that you should be thinking about.