Are there any legal implications to registering a customer's domain name in your own name?
Is it a bad thing - ie could you in any way be held responsible if there are problems in the customer's business? Or is it a good thing - ie does it help to prevent customers taking the website you've worked hard at and getting it hosted somewhere cheaper (we currently ask customers to keep us as hosts for 18 months after website creation).
We are a fairly new web design company and have, in the past, registered customer's domains in our name - our intial customers were people known to us and we felt happy doing this.
We are now starting to branch out and have recently spoken to a potential customer who is planning to set up an import business that could grow to handle big money.
I would appreciate any views.

If you want a client to stay with you for 18 months then include it in your contract.

Regarding who the domain name should be registered to. I believe it should be to the customers name. They are tied to your hosting via the contract, you do not (or if you do, you shouldn't) own your customers domain name.

Many thanks for your reply Jason. We have already put the 18 months' hosting in the contract - I think we will now ensure the customers own their own domain name unless anyone has any views/evidence to the contrary?

I would never allow a customers website to be registered in my own company name, should they start doing illegal stuff the DCMA will come knocking on your door.

We try to have all of our clients register their own domain names.

We do have 2 clients' domain names registered to us, only because they couldn't figure out the interface to register them and I didn't have their payment info at the time.

Since we provide full-service design, development, hosting, ssl, etc., it hasn't been an issue - we just include their registration fees in with their bill.

One point... for the domains that we have registered for clients, we put their info as the Administrative Contact and used Transio as the Billing and Technical contacts. That's important.

We register the domain name on our client's behalf. This allows us to setup the Name Servers and add our information as the technical contact as most clients would rather avoid the domain name setup altogether. All the other contact info belongs to the client. We initially pay for the domain name and then bill the customer later, with a small fee for our time of course. Once we receive payment, we provide the login info for the domain management control panel. The rest is up to them.

Many thanks all for your replies. We shall definitely from now on register domains in the client's name.