UDRP has been denied.
Clasen Quality Chocolate, Inc. of Madison, Wisconsin filed a UDRP to grab the domain CQC.com.
Registered in 1997, this three letter .com domain is without doubt valuable; it even consists of “Chinese premium” letters.
According to the UDRP, the Complainant is a manufacturer and seller of “a wide range of confectionary coating products, chocolate filling products and solid chocolate products.”
Complainant owns a registered trademark for CQC, registered with the United States Patent & Trademark Office (“USPTO”) on December 27, 2016. The USPTO registration indicates that Complainant first used the CQC mark in commerce in 2005.
They offered to buy the domain for $1,500 dollars, a price far below the true value of this domain.
Here’s how it happened:
In September 2016, Complainant reached out to Respondent about acquiring the Domain Name. On September 20, 2016, Respondent sent Complainant an e-mail, stating in substance as follows:
“After my research, I have found that we do not currently have customers using cqc.com. So with that said, we are open to an offer for the domain. As I promised yesterday, I will be direct with you. We have not done any domain deals in the past for less than $100k, but I am willing to consider any reasonable offer.”
On September 23, 2016, Complainant sent an e-mail indicating that it was thinking of an offer in the area of USD 10,000. On November 18, 2016, Complainant’s counsel sent Respondent an e-mail asserting its trademark rights in CQC and asserting that Respondent “indicated that it would not sell the domain name for less than $100,000.” Complainant’s counsel asserted that Respondent was not using the Domain name for any legitimate purpose, and threatened to file a complaint with the Center if Respondent did not transfer the Domain Name in exchange for USD 1,500.
Robert A. Badgley, sole panelist at the WIPO, concluded that there was no bad faith at the time the domain was registered:
The Panel cannot conclude from this record that Complainant has satisfied its burden of proving that the Domain Name was registered and used in bad faith. There is no evidence in the record to support the claim that Respondent was aware of and targeted Complainant’s CQC mark when it acquired the Domain Name in 2008. As Respondent notes, numerous entities use the CQC mark to identify and distinguish their goods and services, and Complainant has done nothing to demonstrate that Respondent could have been aware of, let alone targeting the then‑unregistered CQC mark when acquiring the Domain Name – along with a number of other domain names – as part of a business acquisition in 2008.
Read the full text of this UDRP decision for QCQ.com.
Blatant RDNH! Minimum price now has to be $250,000.