A while ago we broke the news of a successful UDRP defense of the aged domain, Gaijin.com, against predatory giant Gaijin Entertainment.
Not only did the domain remain in the hands of its long term registrant and owner, Brandon Harris, but the case was withdrawn at the WIPO. Brandon Harris is a senior designer for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Brandon Harris, owner of Gaijin.com
The Russian owners of Gaijin Entertainment suspended the UDRP complaint, and then attempted to extract a settlement letter from Brandon, who pretty much told them to go f*ck themselves:
“Unsurprisingly, our response was akin to “sit and spin”. The language was stronger, however. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess the precise vocabulary. After another few weeks, the URDP suspension period expired and the complaint was automatically withdrawn. I’ve heard nothing since.”
While Brandon might say that the case ended “not with a bang but with a whimper“, it’s evident that the whimper in this case was from the Gaijin Entertainment side, who were clearly defeated in their attempt to take the domain away.
This case stood a good chance to be tossed out with a “reverse domain name hijacking” decision.
Congratulations, once again, to Brandon Harris for fighting this and winning.
This post is 100% true!
Gaijin is the Japanese word for foreigner. 🙂