Recently we’re witnessing an increase in the number of UDRP cases filed against new gTLD domains; yesterday it was about a dot .Menu domain and this one is about a dot .Company.
The Complainant is Statoil ASA of Stavanger, Norway and they filed a UDRP for the domain name Statoil.company; the Respondent is Scandinavian Health System AS of Norway.
Oil is a big business in every country, especially in Norway, where the Complainant employs 21,000 thousand workers and has been in the fuel and energy field for over 40 years.
Furthermore, they own the trademark for “Statoil.”
The Statoil headquarters in Norway look nothing like the IKEA building.
The Respondent skipped all formalities and emailed the WIPO office directly about the incident:
“Dear Sir, I have received your notice and I have already had communication with the representative of the Complanant and a copy is found herein. The background for registering this domain name was quite simple. My daughter is a member of “Natur og Ungdom” (a well known Norwegian youth organisation working for conserving the environment). She had been working on a project to reveal Statoils involvment in the Canadian tar sand oil exploration. She asked me to find a way to reach out with the information she and others had collected about this. I then suggested that the information might reach the audience better if the URL made it easier to locate the information. I registered the domain knowing that Statoil had not registered it within the Sunrise period and also acknowledging the warning about copyright. I could not see that my daughters right to publicize concern about negative environmental impact of Statoil company’s business disallowed me to register the domain. Soon after however, she decided not to go with this project plan and I thereby decided that the domain name was of little use to me anymore. I therefore responded positively as can be seen below”
The correspondence referred to was an email from the Respondent to the Complainant’s representative dated May 19, 2014 in which the following was stated:
“Dear Monika, Please find enclosed the Authorization Info as agreed earlier. The domain name has been blocked for moving by the Registrar until now, so that is why it took me so long to come back to you. I am asking your client to pay NOK 25000,- for our cost of registration, acquisition, legal fees and my time in handling this case.”
In case you missed the last part: 25000 Norwegian Kroner equal $4,048 USD which is hardly “out of pocket costs” to register the Statoil.company domain name.
Naturally, the single panelist, Knud Wallberg, approved none of this malarkey and instead ordered the domain to be transferred to the Complainant.
For the full text of the UDRP about Statoil.Company, click here.
