UDRP has been denied.
The UDRP against the aged domain, Kion.com, has been denied at the WIPO.
The Complainant is KION Material Handling GmbH of Wiesbaden, Germany who asserted that the Respondent, Kion Printing Inc. of City of Industry, California, had no rights to the domain.
Registered in 1996, Kion.com was targeted for the following reasons:
The Complainant owns various registered trademarks for the word “kion”. By way of example, US trademark no. 79120076 KION, filed on May 8, 2012 and registered on April 29, 2014. These trademarks are referred to in this decision as the “KION trademarks”. None of the KION trademarks were applied for or registered before 2006.
The Complainant is also owner of various domain names incorporating the word “kion”, including:
<kiongroup.com>; <kion.industries>; <kion.group>; <kion.us>; and <kionnorthamerica.us>.
The Respondent is (or was) a printing business. According to California State records placed in evidence by the Complainant, the Respondent currently has a legal status under California law of “SOS/FTB SUSPENDED”.
Incredibly, there was no response by the Respondent.
The panelist, however, noted that the formed company’s state does not affect automatically the rights to the domain name:
“The difficulty with this argument is that it does not establish that the Respondent’s rights are necessarily extinguished, as opposed to being suspended. The website relied upon indicates the rights in question, including the right of the Respondent to use its own name, may be reinstated.
For the reasons already discussed above the Panel does not accept the Complainant’s assertion that the Respondent no longer exists. The filed evidence establishes the Respondent’s current status under California law is suspended, but it appears that such a suspension can in at least some circumstances be reversed.”
The end result: the UDRP request to transfer the domain to the Complainant was denied.
Read the full text of the decision.
