Recent Posts
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UDRP tip: put your domain in the Whois
If you’re fighting off a bogus UDRP complaint on one of your domain names, the onus is on you to prove that you have “rights and legitimate interests” in the domain.
That could be tricky, especially if you think you may been assigned a panelist with a pro-complainant bent, but there may be some ways to mitigate the risk of losing your domain.
Take this recent case, for example: PissedConsumer.com versus ThePissedOffConsumer.com.
The panelist determined that the registrant of ThePissedOffConsumer.com had no “rights and legitimate interests”on the grounds that a) it was competing with the complainant, b) the web site used the same color (red) as the complainant and c) the registrant was not known by the domain.
Ignoring the first two (highly debatable) findings, let’s look at c). The panelist wrote:
Complainant alleges that Respondent has never used a company name “The Pissed-Off Consumer” in connection with operation of any business activities. The WHOIS information for the disputed domain name lists the registrant of the domain as “John Cross.”
The Panel finds, based on the evidence in the record, that Respondent is not commonly known by the disputed domain name, and as such lacks rights and legitimate interests in the said name
In other words, because Whois showed the name of the registrant, rather than the name of the domain, the registrant was not “commonly known” as the domain and lacked rights.
To add insult to injury, the complainant was assumed to have earned the right to the mark “Pissed Consumer” before it had officially acquired a trademark (and before the disputed domain was registered) simply by virtue of operating PissedConsumer.com, despite the fact that it hides behind Whois privacy and is called Consumer Opinion Corp.
Presumably, if Cross had simply added the text “ThePissedOffConsumer” to his Whois record, the panelist would have had one less data point “in the record” to justify his finding.
In fringe UDRP cases, that could prove a useful defensive tactic.
Prime example of why UDRP could do with an overhaul IMHO
In most cases I’ve read where the name is actually in the whois, the panelists find a way to brush it off. Still, can’t hurt.
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