Manwin files its first cybersquatting complaint

Manwin Licensing, the company currently suing ICANN and ICM Registry claiming .xxx breaks US competition law, has filed its first cybersquatting complaint using the UDRP.

It’s over a .com domain, pornhubarchive.com (don’t go there, not only is it NSFW but it also looks like it panders to some very dubious tastes), which Manwin thinks infringes on its rights to the PornHub name

The domain is registered to a Russian, while pornhub.com itself is protected by Whois privacy.

There’s a certain irony here. PornHub is a “tube” site that allows users to upload content and has itself come under fire for violating intellectual property rights in the past.

It was sued by the the porn production company Pink Visual for copyright infringement in 2010.

Fox takes control of squatted .xxx domain

Twentieth Century Fox has withdrawn its cybersquatting complaint about the domain name foxstudios.xxx after the domain was transferred into its control.

As I reported on Tuesday, the UDRP case was a no-brainer. Fox Studios is Fox’s production subsidiary, and the owner of foxstudios.xxx had offered the domain for sale on eBay for a ludicrous $1.9 million.

This would have been more than enough to show bad faith.

The Whois record for the domain shows it is now owned by Fox, with an email address corresponding to an outside law firm. From here, it still resolves to a for-sale page, however.

Three more .xxx UDRP complaints have been filed this week, all by Turkish companies, bringing the total since December 29 to eight.

Fox files cybersquatting complaint on .xxx domain

Twentieth Century Fox appears to have filed a UDRP complaint over the domain name foxstudios.xxx.

The domain, which does not currently resolve, was registered to a Connecticut man in December, shortly after ICM Registry took .xxx into general availability.

It’s the fifth UDRP case in the .xxx space since late December. The others are richardbranson.xxx, valero.xxx, heb.xxx and markafoni.xxx.

While it’s a National Arbitration Forum complaint – so the identity of the complainant has not yet been disclosed – Fox Studios is a Fox subsidiary that does business at foxstudios.com.

A bit of Googling reveals that Fox Studios was also the name of a gay porn production company that won some awards in the late 1990s. Its DVDs are still for sale from several sites.

So it may not be a slam-dunk UDRP win for Fox in this case. If the registrant bothers to respond to the complaint he could probably make a decent case that it was not a bad-faith registration.

(UPDATE: Thanks to @mneylon for pointing out that foxstudios.xxx is for sale on eBay with a buy-now price of $1.9 million. Ergo: the squatter’s gonna lose.)

Incidentally, foxstudios.net appears to be owned by a small but legitimate photography business in Michigan, which I think is a perfect example of how two companies can happily share a brand using different TLDs.

MasterCard files UDRP on “priceless” geo domains

MasterCard recently registered several “priceless” domain names including the names of major cities and has filed cybersquatting complaints on seven more belonging to third parties.

The credit card company has this week entered UDRP complaints on pricelessistanbul.com, pricelessamsterdam.com, pricelessnewyork.com, pricelessmexico.com, pricelesslosangeles.com, pricelessparis.com and pricelesslondon.com.

The domains were registered separately by four different registrants over the last couple of years and are all parked, mostly with Go Daddy’s default parking page.

Interestingly, MasterCard also hand-registered several “priceless+city” domains at the end of November, including pricelessberlin.com, pricelesssydney.com pricelessmoscow.com, pricelessshanghai.com, pricelessmadrid.com and pricelessbangkok.com.

The company has not filed UDRP complaints about domains such as pricelessrome.com or pricelesssanfrancisco.com, which appear to belong to some of the same registrants.

It has also left the names of other popular city-break destinations unregistered. Domains such as pricelessprague.com, pricelessathens.com and pricelessdublin.com are currently available.

Could the company be working on a marketing campaign targeted only to specific cities?

The company has form when it comes to enforcing its long-held “priceless” trademark. It notably won control of priceless.org in an uncontested UDRP in 2007.

UDRP reform put on hold for four years

ICANN’s cybersquatting rules, including the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, will be reviewed and possibly reformed, but probably not until 2016 at the earliest.

The Generic Names Supporting Organization Council voted last Thursday to put the start of UDRP reform on hold until 18 months after the first new top-level domains go live.

The review will also take into account other cybersquatting policies including Uniform Rapid Suspension, which will be binding on all new gTLD registries but has yet to be be tested.

This is the relevant part of the resolution:

the GNSO Council requests a new Issue Report on the current state of all rights protection mechanisms implemented for both existing and new gTLDs, including but not limited to, the UDRP and URS, should be delivered to the GNSO Council by no later than eighteen (18) months following the delegation of the first new gTLD.

An Issue Report is compiled by ICANN staff and often leads to a Policy Development Process that creates policies binding on registries, registrars and ultimately registrants.

Because the first new gTLDs are not expected to be delegated until the first quarter of 2013 at the earliest, the Issue Report would not be delivered until half way through 2014.

After ICANN public comment and analysis, the GNSO Council would be unlikely to kick off a PDP until the first half of 2015. The PDP itself could take months or years to complete.

In short, if UDRP is going to be reformed, we’re unlikely to see the results until 2016.

The Council resolution, which was in line with Governmental Advisory Committee advice, was proposed by the registries, following many months of ICANN public outreach and discussion.

Non-commercial users in the GNSO were most strongly in favor of an accelerated timetable, but a request to reduce the 18-month breather to a year failed to find support.

The Intellectual Property Constituency had proposed an amendment that would have kicked off the process after 100 UDRP and 100 URS cases had been heard in new gTLDs, rather than after a specified time, but the motion was defeated.