A registered trademark does not give automatic rights to a domain.
Every domain has a price tag at some point in time.
Making an offer for a domain clearly slated for development, can get quite annoying.
When you repeatedly make offers, either higher or lower, seeking to harass the domain owner, most likely you’re not going to get anything.
After years of not hearing back from the owners of PodHotels.com, BD Hotels, LLC of New York filed a UDRP at the WIPO.
The Complainant owns registered trade mark rights for THE POD HOTEL in the United States and for POD HOTELS in the European Union.
The owners of PodHotels.com are a British company specializing in “pod hotels,” individual rooms for rental; the domain is formed from a generic pair of words.
In the UDRP documents the Respondent made it clear that the domain was not for sale, fending off the Complainant’s offers for several years, from 2007 to 2015.
The sole panelist, Alistair Payne, found nothing wrong with this type of response:
“The Panel does not find that the evidence supports the Complainant’s allegation that the disputed domain name has been used in bad faith. Mr. Jonathan Murphy made it clear from the outset that he had registered the disputed domain name for his own projects which were subsequently to be undertaken through the Complainant.
He did not initiate contact with the Complainant in order to sell the disputed domain name at a profit and it was some time before he appears to have been prepared to enter into further discussions with the Complainant.
The fact that the Complainant would not agree to his requested transfer price or to his proposals to license the disputed domain name to the Complainant on a commercial basis, does not in all the circumstances necessarily impute bad faith and the Policy should not be capable of being used as a tool by a complainant to acquire a domain name where it was originally registered by the same entity, or “moving spirit” of that entity, in good faith and prior to the complainant having any competing rights or interest in the disputed domain name.”
Consequently, the domain PodHotels.com was ordered to remain with the Respondent.
For the full text of this UDRP decision, click here.
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I suppose it’s a two way street. It sucks not to get a response from a potential buyer and at the same time, it sucks getting lowball offers that you know are clearly under the market value. It seems to be a UDRP out of frustration more than anything. Both sides of that coin have something to be frustrated about.