Mail-order wife site silences critic with UDRP

A dating service has failed in a second attempt to hijack a domain name on the basis that the corresponding web site uses its “hot Russian brides” trademark in its directory structure.
Romantic Tours, which runs hotrussianbrides.com, filed a UDRP claim against agencyscams.com, claiming its URL agencyscams.com/why/hotrussianbrides infringed its trademark.
It lost the case, with the National Arbitration Forum arbitrator quite reasonably noting that “proceedings under the UDRP may be applied only to domain names”.
As noted over at Domain Name Wire, Romantic Tours tried the same ballsy tactic with jimslists.com, and was similarly unsuccessful.
Jimslists.com and and agencyscams.com are run by the same person. They’re basically gripe sites naming and shaming allegedly dodgy dating agencies and the allegedly dodgy women who use them.
While Romantic Tours may have lost its UDRP case, it appears to have got what it wanted anyway.
The offending URLs are no longer active on either site, and detailed references to hotrussianbrides.com appear to have been yanked, resulting in 404s.

Cheaters’ dating site wins 101 typo domains

You’d think a web site that enables married people to cheat on their partners would have difficulty taking the moral high ground on any issue. Apparently not.
AshleyMadison.com, which offers an “Affairs Guaranteed” promise, has just won 101 typo domain names under a mass UDRP claim against a single respondent.
The disputed domains included everything from zashleymadison.com to aeshleymadison.com. Two were PPC pages, the remainder apparently remained unused.
Judging from the National Arbitration Forum decision, this was an open-and-shut case of typosquatting.
The registrant was hiding behind a Bahamas-based privacy service that declined to close his true identity.
He did not respond to the UDRP filing.

Registrars responsible for proxy cybersquatters

Domain name registrars can be liable when their customers break the law, if those customers use a privacy service, according to new ICANN guidance.
The ICANN advisory clarifies the most recent Registrar Accreditation Agreement, and seems primarily pertinent to UDRP cases where the registrar refuses to cooperate with the arbitrator’s request for proper Whois records.
The advisory says:

a Registered Name Holder licensing the use of a domain is liable for harm caused by the wrongful use of the domain unless the Registered Name Holder promptly identifies the licensee to a party providing the Registered Name Holder with reasonable evidence of actionable harm

In other words, if a domain gets hit with a UDRP claim or trademark infringement lawsuit, as far as the RAA is concerned the proxy service is the legal registrant unless the registrar quickly hands over its customer’s details.
Law enforcement and intellectual property interests have been complaining about registrars refusing to do so for years, most recently in comments on ICANN’s Whois accuracy study.
ICANN offers a definition of the word “promptly” as “within five business days” and “reasonable evidence” as trademark ownership and evidence of infringement.
I don’t think this ICANN guidance will have much of an impact on privacy services offered by the big registrars, which generally seem quite happy to hand over customer identities on demand.
Instead, this looks like it could be the start of a broader ICANN crackdown on certain non-US registrars offering “bulletproof” registrations to cybersquatters and other ne’er-do-wells.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find the number of ICANN de-accreditations citing refusal to cooperate with UDRP claims increasing in future.
The new ICANN document is a draft, and you can comment on it here.

UDRP of the day: how-to-roll-a-blunt-with-a-swisher-sweet.info

This is mildly amusing. Somebody, presumably the cigar company, has filed a UDRP claim against the owner of how-to-roll-a-blunt-with-a-swisher-sweet.info.
The domain name was registered last month and, sadly, does not appear to have any content yet. It’s registered to “Gregory Bong”.
In the US, a “Swisher Sweet” is your basic bog-standard convenience store panatela cigar.
A “blunt” is what the registrant was probably smoking.
The .com version of the domain is, unsurprisingly, available, so I can only assume price was a big factor in Bong’s choice of TLD.

RapidShare chases cybersquatters

RapidShare, the popular German file-hosting site, has filed six cybersquatting claims against people with the word “rapidshare” in their domains.
The UDRP complaints are either a sign that RapidShare is cracking down on pirated content, or an example of balls-out intellectual property chutzpah.
My guess is it’s the latter, for two reasons.
First, a search reveals dozens of popular sites with “rapidshare” in the domain, all serving RapidShare links to copyrighted content, none of which have had UDRP claims filed against them.
Second, each of the six domains RapidShare has filed claims for seem to provide links only to files hosted by competing services such as Hotfile.com or Uploading.com.
RapidShare.com is currently the 35th most-popular site on the internet, more popular than Craigslist, according to Alexa.
A German court ruled two years ago that it had to start deleting pirate content, and it has been playing whack-a-mole with the bootleggers ever since.
Now, it wants the World Intellectual Property Organization to help it protect its trademark. There’s irony for you.

$10 billion disk-maker wins domain name

Seagate Technology, the world’s biggest hard disk drive maker, has won seagatetechnology.com – the exact match of its company name – at UDRP.
The squatter, identified as Standard Bearer Enterprises, registered the name in 2004. That’s six years of squeezing click revenue from an exact-match name of a multi-billion dollar firm.
Standard Bearer has a track record of losing famous names at UDRP, and was named in a cybersquatting lawsuit filed by Andre Agassi and Steffi Graff last year.
Seagate is a huge company, reporting revenue approaching $10 billion last year. It has been using the Seagate Technology trademark since 1983.
It’s not exactly naive about domain names, either.
Its primary domain, seagate.com, was first registered in 1992 – the Neolithic by internet standards. It beggars belief that its taken 18 years to secure its long-form company name.

WIPO’s UDRP market share lead narrows

The number of UDRP cases filed with the National Arbitration Forum dipped slightly last year, according to NAF numbers released today.
The organization said it received 1,759 filings last year, compared to 1,770 in 2008. Only 1,333 of the cases were actually heard; the others were dropped or settled.
While that’s a decline for NAF, it’s not quite as steep as the almost 10% drop experienced by rival arbitrator WIPO over the same period.
That said, WIPO is still the primary choice of companies trying to enforce their trademarks in the domain name system, saying last month that it received 2,107 complaints in 2009.
It was also the year of big multi-domain cases for both outfits.
WIPO handed 1,542 domains to Inter-Continental Hotels in a single case, while NAF transferred a relatively modest 1,017 domains to ConsumerInfo.com.

Richard Dawkins files UDRP claim for richarddawkins.com?

Biologist Richard Dawkins, perhaps the planet’s most famous and controversial atheist, has apparently filed a UDRP claim for richarddawkins.com.
The domain, which is down, is registered to a New Jersey address. For the last 10 years, up until at least a week ago, it has sold Dawkins’ books via Amazon’s affiliate program.
The UDRP case was filed with the National Arbitration Forum yesterday. The parties to the case are not yet listed.
Dawkins’ official web site is hosted at richarddawkins.net.
Interestingly, richarddawkins.org is owned by the loopy creationist group Access Research Network. ARN’s page incorrectly points visitors to richarddawkins.com if they want the “official” site.
Dawkins may have a struggle on his hands. Celebrity cybersquatting cases are rarely straightforward, and he may have trouble proving both trademark rights and bad faith.
Better knock on wood, Richard.

New gTLDs will cost $155 billion, honest

A report out from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, which pegs the cost of first-round new gTLD defensive registrations at $746 million, has set eyes rolling this evening.
CircleID rather oddly compares it to a recent Minds + Machines study, “predicting new gTLDs will only cost $.10 per trademark worldwide.”
Apples and oranges, in my view.
But numbers are fun.
My own estimate, using data from both CADNA and M+M, puts the total cost of new gTLDs defensive registrations at $155.85 billion.
For the avoidance of doubt, you should (continue reading)

Allstate cybersquatter gets away with it for a decade

Allstate Insurance Company, a US insurer with over $30 billion in revenues, has just won a UDRP claim over AllstateInsurance.com, almost 10 years after the domain was first registered.
The company has been using the Allstate trademark for almost 80 years, and is currently the second-largest insurance company in America.
AllstateInsurance.com, the exact match of its company name as well as a combination of its trademark and its primary line of business, was registered in November 2000.
It is currently registered to a Korean individual named Seung Bum; he fought the UDRP claim unsuccessfully.
After a brief period being used by an apparently genuine insurance firm, the domain has been parked with PPC ads for other insurance companies for the best part of the last decade.
The volume of type-in traffic over than period must have been substantial, and one can only speculate how much revenue was accumulated.
All of which begs the question: why on earth did Allstate wait 10 years to file a UDRP claim?
It seems that cybersquatting, at least in this case, pays.