Owner of DataMiner.co nailed for reverse domain name hijacking over DataMiner.com

1 Novembre 2016
Senza categoria

Company filed UDRP after failing to negotiate a purchase of DataMiner.com.

Skyline Communications NV, which operates a business at DataMiner.co, have been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name DataMiner.com.

The company filed a cyberquatting complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization against WebMagic, a company that registered the .com domain name in 1996. That’s well before Skyline started using the DataMiner name.

Skyline then tried the buy the domain name multiple times starting in 2005. It failed to strike a deal. It filed the UDRP shortly after obtaining a trademark for the term DataMiner.

The three-person panel said the case should have never been filed:

n the view of the Panel this is a complaint which should never have been launched. The Complainant and its lawyer should have appreciated that establishing registration and use in bad faith in respect of a domain name which had first been registered nearly two decades ago was likely to involve difficult considerations. The Complainant appears to have ignored any such considerations. The Complainant should have known that there was no case under the third requirement of the Policy, due to the lack of any use in bad faith of the disputed domain name. In the Complaint, no attempt was made to demonstrate the existence of bad faith registration or bad faith use. In addition, the Complainant contacted the Respondent several times in the years 2005, 2010 and 2014 to try to buy the disputed domain name with no success. After its trademark was registered, the Complainant decided to launch this complaint under the Policy. Finally there are several of the Complainant’s factual and legal contentions that border on the misleading. As an example the Panel mentions the incomplete quote of the holding in the Torus case, as pointed out by the Respondent; mischaracterizing the Respondent’s business (see Response, Annexes 5 and 6); referring to the Respondent’s activities as “cybersquatting” on no more authority than its own judgment (a search by the Panel found no case in which the Respondent was a respondent on the WIPO data base and only two cases on the National Arbitration Forum data base, in both of which the complaint was denied); and calling its mark “not descriptive”.

It’s worth noting that one of the panelists was Andrew Christie, a panelist known to occasionally go out of his way to find in favor of complainants.

© DomainNameWire.com 2016. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com.