I would like to open a forum about youtube

[kevcj]

What do yall think about this?

I was thinking of opening a good quality forum on youtube. This aint gonna be no spam stuff, we are talking Vbulletin software running on a dedicated server and with a nice custom theme.

The domain name was bought this morning, it contains the word youtube and the word forum. The time line is to have the forum up and running sometime in the first week of October.

The tag line / or site title would be something like "The unofficial youtube forums".

In the rules and guidelines would be statements saying the forum is not associated with youtube or google.

The plan is to build a social networking forum for youtube publishers. Where people can post their questions, give tips on youtube videos, discuss video editing software, and post their videos.

There is an automatic embedding modification for vbulletin I would install. When someone post a link to their video, the site would embed the video into the forum.

Any possible legal problems with this plan?

Even though the word "youtube" might be protected, so are words like "ford", "toyota",,,, and people have all kinds of forums on those topics.

[Trasion]

I'd say that it'd be a pretty good idea. But it does sound like there may be a few problems with it (legally). Your best bet would be to contact YouTube instead of asking us here.

[fanyap]

Have you seen? I don't think your going to have any legal problems....

http://www.youtubeforums.com/

[Lautaro]

Originally Posted by fanyap

Have you seen? I don't think your going to have any legal problems....

http://www.youtubeforums.com/

If someone is using your website logo for his own you'll still say its legal?
i don't think so..

[fanyap]

To be real with you if I was a site like YouTube I wouldn't mind it at all. It's clearly stating its the unofficial YouTube forum - if anything it's free marketing for YouTube...legally YES there would be a case but not worth the time to go after a small guy. Really depends on who your messing with I suppose.

[Digital Jedi]

Legally, as I understood it, domain names cannot be copyrighted. So YouTube doesn't have a claim on the use of the domain name with the phrase "youtube" in it. Look around the web at the literally thousands of fan sites that use the name of their subject in the domain title.

Trademarks, on the other hand, are something different. But that's not what your asking to use. Your asking to start a forum that's a discussion forum about YouTube. No different than any other forum on any other subject.