UDRP cases soar at WIPO in 2021
The World Intellectual Property Organization has released statistics for cybersquatting cases in 2021, showing one of the biggest growth spurts in UDRP’s 22-year history.
Trademark owners filed 5,128 UDRP complaints last year, WIPO said, a 22% increase on 2020.
There have been almost 56,000 cases since 1999, covering over 100,000 domains names, it said.
The number of annual cases has been growing every year since 2013, its numbers show.
WIPO took a punt that the increase last year might be related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but didn’t really attempt to back up that claim, saying in a release:
The accelerating growth in cybersquatting cases filed with the WIPO Center can be largely attributed to trademark owners reinforcing their online presence to offer authentic content and trusted sales outlets, with a greater number of people spending more time online, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The number of domains hit by UDRP that include strings such as “covid” or “corona” or “vaccine” are pretty small, amounting to just a few dozen domains across all providers, searches show.
The growth does not necessarily mean the total number of UDRP cases has increased by a commensurate amount — some of it might be accounted for by WIPO winning market share from the five other ICANN-approved UDRP providers.
It also does not indicate an increase in cybersquatting. WIPO did not release stats on the number of cases that resulted in a domain name being transferred to the complaining trademark owner.
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“Trademark owners filed 5,128 UDRP complaints last year”
5,128 UDRP complaints were filed last year. In quite a few instances, the filer was found not to be a “trademark owner”.
Merely filing a UDRP complaint does not make one a “trademark owner”, as that is one of the things the filer must attempt to prove.
“WIPO said”