Five months ago, we announced that Gaijin Entertainment sent a C&D letter to Brandon Harris, owner of Gaijin.com, which he hand-registered in 1995.
Gaijin Entertainment, specializing in gaming software, has now filed a UDRP for the domain name – for a trademark it acquired 16 years after Gaijin.com was registered!
The claims brought forth by Gaijin Entertainment include the following:
- Gaijin.com, registered on May 22, 1995, “fully incorporates” the “Gaijin” wordmark, which was not registered until October 11, 2011.
- One of the most prominent tags within the Gaijin.com blog is “Games” and this apparently confuses people.
- The word “gaijin” is used incorrectly. Brandon Harris chose the word “gaijin”, meaning “foreigner” or “alien” because at the time he was studying philosophical principles regarding identity and definition – specifically about how things are defined through contrast and opposition, and therefore his own identity, from his own perspective, was always and forever going to be “alien”. For the record, Gaijin Entertainment is using the term incorrectly, also.
- Certain blog posts on Gaijin.com have bad words in them and apparently tarnish other people’s reputations.
- Email addresses used on the Gaijin.com blog, allegedly confuse people into thinking Brandon Harris is an employee of Gaijin Entertainment.
- Brandon Harris is allegedly attempting to extort $750,000.00 dollars from them. This comes from a throw-away email exchange he had with one of their employees, which stated that if someone seriously offered a million dollars for the domain, he’d be negligent in not considering the offer.
- The fact that Gaijin.com shows up after them in Google searches means that he is somehow diverting traffic from them.
We’re quite fond of Mr. Harris, a creative individual, and we’re pleased to learn that he will be fighting this UDRP tooth and nail, with the assistance of the very capable attorney, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen.
This is a monumental case that fully displays the abuse of the UDRP system by corporations that claim to own exclusive rights to a domain name, registered a full seven years before their formation.
Hopefully, the decision not only will be on behalf of Brandon Harris and his domain name, Gaijin.com, but it will be declared an example of a reverse domain name hijacking, ripe to be added on Rick Schwartz’s HallOfShame.com.
We will keep an eye on this case.
