A registered trademark does not give automatic rights to a domain.
This is one for the domain books.
The owner of the domain Cyberbit.com failed to respond to a UDRP filed against him, by Cyberbit Ltd., of Herzliya, Israel, and won the case with a finding of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking!
According to the WIPO filing, the Complainant contends that the Domain Name is identical to the Complainant’s CYBERBIT registered trade mark; that the Respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the Domain Name; and that the Domain Name was registered and is being used in bad faith.
Tony Willoughby, sole panelist, had a different opinion over the Complainant’s assertions, and not only denied the request for a transfer, he slapped the Complainant with an RDNH finding:
“It seems difficult to believe that a member company of such a prestigious group of companies as that headed by the Complainant’s parent company could have deliberately set out to abuse the process by launching such a fundamentally flawed complaint. Nonetheless, it is the case that the original Complaint omitted the section dealing with bad faith registration and use. How did it come to be removed? Was it a conscious decision or an error? When the deficiency was drawn to the Complainant’s attention by the Center and the invitation to file an amended Complaint was taken up, why was the deficiency not properly addressed? The amendments were purely cosmetic.
The deficiencies must have been obvious to anyone remotely familiar with the Policy. The Domain Name was first registered in 2003 nearly twelve years before the Complainant acquired its registered trade mark rights. The Respondent through his Danish company, Cyberbit A/S, a payment processing company, was to the Complainant’s knowledge at the time of filing the Complaint using the Domain Name at least as long ago as 2008, seven years before the Complainant acquired its registered trade mark rights. None of the evidence relating to the Respondent’s use of the Domain Name supports any contention that the Respondent was at any time targeting the Complainant or its trade mark.
If the Complainant did not launch the Complaint (and pursue the matter by way of the amended Complaint) knowing that it was doomed to failure, a matter upon which the Panel comes to no concluded view, it was nonetheless, in the Panel’s view, at the very least culpably reckless as to the Complaint’s prospects of success and thus guilty of an abuse of this administrative proceeding.”
WOW.
For the full text of this UDRP decision for the domain Cyberbit.com, click here.
