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RBS wins totally bogus UDRP complaint
Kevin Murphy,
June 28, 2010, 17:46:17 (UTC),
Domain Policy
The Royal Bank of Scotland has been handled control of the domain rbscout.com in a UDRP decision I have no trouble at all describing as utterly bogus.
RBS, naturally enough, owns a trademark on the term “RBS”. Its UDRP claim is based on the notion that a domain beginning with “rbs” is therefore confusingly similar.
For this to work, logically, the meaning of “rbscout” must be taken as “RBS cout”.
Cout?
The idea that the registrant actually had “RB scout” in mind does not appear to entered into the deliberation of the National Arbitration Forum panelist, Paul Dorf.
It took me all of two minutes with Whois and Google to determine that the registrant, The Auction Scout, is a player in the market for auctioning heavy machinery, and that RB, Ritchie Bros., is such an auctioneer.
There’s simply no way the registrant could have had RBS in mind when he registered the domain back in February.
So why did Dorf find evidence of bad faith?
Because the domain rbscout.com resolves to a default Go Daddy parking page, which displays advertising links to financial services sites including RBS’s own site.
So, just because Go Daddy’s algorithms are confused by the string “rbs” appearing in a domain, human beings would be similarly confused?
It defies common sense. Dorf should be ashamed of himself.
[…] At least, that’s the conclusion I’m drawing from a couple of recent clueless UDRP decisions. […]