Gregory Ricks Loses LTI.com; Doesn’t Respond to Complaint
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Rewe Touristik Hotels & Investment GmbH picks up domain at arbitration.
Here’s an interesting UDRP in which the respondent didn’t file his response on a three character domain.
Domainer Gregory Ricks just lost the three character domain name LTI.com to a hotel company after failing to respond the the UDRP at World Intellectual Property Association (WIPO).
Something is certainly fishy here, since Ricks has gone out of his way to protect three character domain names at UDRP through strong responses and even lawsuits. When he lost an arbitration for BME.com, he quickly filed a lawsuit to block the transfer. I sent and email to Ricks asking for an explanation and will post it if he responds.
The complainant, which was awarded the domain name, is a member of the Rewe Group, a German retailing group. The Complainant (formally named LTI Hotelbeteiligungs- und Investitions gmbH) offers travel and hotel services under the name LTI International Hotels and its abbreviated form, LTI. The company operates at lti.de. LTI has been in business for almost twenty years.
LTI claimed that many of the pay-per-click links hosted on LTI.com were for travel services, which seems to be backed up by Archive.org.
Thanks Ramiro for the tip.
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This just confirms that abbreviations are a potential legal nightmare. Un-trademarked generic words are the only thing you have a decent chance of keeping out of the hands of thieves with money.
Cheers,
Steve
Not sure why he didn’t respond but he was profiting from LTI’s name so there’s a good chance he would have lost it even if he did respond.
This is why anyone with acronym domains need to make sure their pages do not auto optimize.
With the number of decisions going against Mr. Ricks at the udrp and the corresponding development of his reputation as a serial cybersquatter it makes it very difficult for him to defend the use of his (ex) domain names in general and even more so in situations such as this one where they are used to infringe on the rights of others.
Any update on this?
ryan, I never heard from Greg Ricks on this
[...] that we are a porn site will look really funny in light of his domain portfolio. (Ricks actually just lost a similar case, but for some reason decided not to follow that one up with another silly counter-suit. I guess [...]