Trademarks do not get you the .com necessarily.
Just because you live in Ukraine, does not mean your response to a UDRP warrants a loss.
After getting hit with a UDRP over the domain SolidX.com, a Ukrainian married couple refuted the Complainant’s claims of having no rights to the domain.
Mr. Viktor Viktorovych Cherkasov and Ms. Darya Mykhaylivna Grygoryeva contracted marriage in Kharkov, Ukraine in the summer of 2014; in October of 2013, the domain SolidX.com was acquired via the GoDaddy expired domain auctions.
SolidX.com was registered in 2007 by a Swedish company that still uses SolidX.se as its domain name.
The Complainant is SolidX Partners Inc. of New York, who were granted a trademark for SOLIDX in mid March 2015. The company uses the domain SLDX.com, currently.
The Respondent utilized the services of a US based attorney, and in their defense established claim to SolidX.com as a provider of programming solutions; the Complainant’s mark is about financial services.
The single panelist noted, among other things, the following:
“…the registration of the disputed domain name predated not only the application date for Complainant’s SOLIDX trademark, June 11, 2014, but also the first use and first use in commerce of the trademark as stated by Complainant: June 16, 2014. Although the current registrant of the disputed domain name appears to be Ms. Darya Grygoryeva, Respondent evidenced that Mr. Cherkasov married Ms. Grygoryeva on June 25, 2014, and alleged that she and her husband in the past have appeared as registrants for the disputed domain name, and that they have always managed their business ventures jointly.”
After deliberation, the domain SolidX.com was ordered to remain with the Respondent; no case of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking was found, however.
For the full text of the UDRP decision on SolidX.com, click here.
