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Should one always use "www" as the prefix to one's official domain name? I will be launching an e-commerce website shortly and my attorney needs to know the official domain name of my site for copyright purposes. Are there any reasons why I should designate it as "www.example.com" as opposed to "example.com"? I've always used "example.com" during development because it was easier to type and I'd have Nginx rewrite all requests for "www.example.com" to "example.com". Should I perhaps say "www.example.com" is the official domain name and reconfigure Nginx to rewrite all requests to "example.com" to "www.example.com"?

Thanks!

Jim
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ServerFault is not the place for legal advise, talk to your lawyer for that.

In general though you copyright your brandname and not <brandname> + TLD.

The only reason to use the pattern "<something> dot COM" or "<something> dot other-TLD" as your brandname is that you can't get away with copyrighting just plain <something> by itself as the brand.

Another reason not to include the extension is that you don't want a competitor to be able to get away with drawing away customers from your .COM by using "<something>.CO.UK", "<something>.CA" etc.

IMHO There is no good reason at all to even consider including WWW in your brand.

Note: That is just my recommendation on the brand, not a recommendation on what to use as the DNS name(s) for your website...

HBruijn
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Since a domain name is used on other services than simply the web server, I would go with the domain name alone.

Of course, this is not a technical question as it has absolutely no impact on your operations and it is common practice to allow both http://example.com and http://www.example.com.

Julie Pelletier
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