A UDRP brought against the owner of the domain name NAE.com has been successfully defended at the National Arbitration Forum.
The Respondent is Vertical Axis, represented by the law office of Ari Goldberger – ESQwire.com.
It’s inconceivable that a domain registered 15 years ago, according to DomainTools, would have to be defended against National Automotive Experts LLC, who claim use of the NAE mark since 2006.
An interesting note: The Complainant only recently applied for the NAE mark at the USPTO, and thus this UDRP is based on a “common law” mark claim.
The Complainant alleges having spent more than $2,000,000 dollars advertising under their mark.
A three member panel stated that the Complainant’s claims to the domain are baseless:
“The Panel declines to find that Complainant has rights in the NAE mark for several reasons. As Respondent points out, NAE is the combination of three letters in the English language, which can be an acronym for more than one entity. While the Panel acknowledges that Complainant and others may refer to Complainant as NAE, it notes that the USPTO has not yet declared that Complainant has the right to monopolize the three letters NAE. Thus, the Panel declines to find that Complainant has trademark rights in the acronym NAE.
Further, the Panel notes that, whether or not the USPTO eventually accepts Complainant’s evidence of secondary meaning and registers the NAE mark, Complainant does not even claim to have rights in NAE prior to 2006, approximately 6 years after Respondent registered the <nae.com> domain name.”
Despite such a clear-cut decision, there was no finding of a Reverse Domain Name Hijacking in this case; the law offices of ESQwire have successfully secured such RDNH findings in several other UDRP cases they defended successfully.
For the full text of this decision for the domain name NAE.com, click here.
Note: ESQwire is a premium sponsor of DomainGang.
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