Golf equipment manufacturer loses questionable attempt to acquire domain name.
When I saw that Ping.me was in arbitration at National Arbitration Forum, I correctly assumed that Ping Golf was behind the dispute. Ping Golf has been aggressive acquiring other domains including “Ping” in the past.
The good news is domain owner Pingify Networks Inc. won the battle for the domain it paid $12,500 for in the .me sunrise auctions. The bad news is the interpretation of the registrar’s domain parking by the panel.
The panel determined that Pingify Networks had rights to the name because of plans to launch a business and even a preliminary patent filing for its product.
The problem for Pingify Networks was that GoDaddy, the registrar at which the domain was registered, had placed golf pay-per-click ads on the parking page for the domain. Pingify didn’t profit from this, and most registrars place similar parking pages on customers’ domain names. The panel didn’t seem to care that this was a registrar parking page and not a customer initiated parking page from which it profited:
There is ample authority for the principle that a respondent cannot abrogate responsibility for use of its domain name. Numerous prior decisions have, rightly in this Panel’s view, held that there is bad faith use of a domain name if it is parked at a revenue driving website which trades on traffic drawn by the magnetism of a third party’s trademark. The fact that links and advertising material might be added by the parking host and not by the domain name registrant itself has been held immaterial to the finding of bad faith use. Nor, for that matter, is bad faith use swept away by curative steps taken only after notice of a complaint.
The cases I’ve read in which the panel didn’t discriminate between if a parked page was intentionally set up to infringe or “auto-optimized” by the parking company infringe concerned paid parking services. I have not seen a similar view of these registrar-created parking pages whereby the registrar profits, not the domain owner.
RegFeeNames.com says
WOW!
Great news for the little guy.
I wonder if ping bid the domain upto 12,500 ?
You would think if they really wanted it they would have kept bidding.
well im glad they didnt, if they wanted the domain they should have paid for it.
DomainNameJuggler says
This is a brighter day for us all!!! I am certain that over time the panel will have enough litigation to provide summary judgement in certain types of cases, thus being cheaper for the little guy in the long run.
Chris Nielsen says
Wow, it sounds like Pingify almost lost that domain because of Godaddy putting ads on it. I wonder how many cases, past and present could also have the same issue. And I wonder if a domain owner that loses a domain could file suit against the registrar?
Maybe not, but I know at least one registrar that puts ads on your domain if it expires, as others do, but if the domain is then renewed the next day, the name servers are NOT changed back and you need to restore them to what they were.
The point being that if the owner is not aware of the problem, they could have someone “pounce” and try to take the domain away even though the owner had a legit use for a site…!
I’m not a lawyer, but I like to think like one sometimes. In my opinion, when actions are taken by a third party that affect content placed on a domain and income earned by that action that is apart from the domain owner, then the third party could be and in cases like this, should be liable at LEAST for the “damages” of the ads on the domain. Ping should go after Godaddy since they were responsible and profited from the ads on the domain. Taking the domain away from Poor Pingify is a different issue in my mind.
David J Castello says
Another nail in the coffin for parking domains. Parking is quickly turning into the Achilles Heel of domain onwership. Now all we need is for ICANN to impose a “Use It Or Lose It” clause if they get held up too long from launching the vanity TLDs.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Chris – one thing I didn’t mention in the article is that Ping.me was protected by DomainsbyProxy. Ping Golf tried to get DomainsByProxy to remain the respondent rather than Pingify. I guess their motivation was because DomainsByProxy wouldn’t really respond, but I found it interesting that they insisted.
A says
Shopping.com the next to go?!
Chris Nielsen says
Andrew: So how did that work? I’m guessing Ping got a court order to find out who the owner of the domain really was? So if you put Elmer Fudd as the registrant do they go after the admin contact?
I use whois privacy somewhat, if it’s free. But in generally it’s something I’d like to see go away. Sure it protects us a little from things like SPAM, but more often it lets people make it more difficult to go after spammers or others that are up to no good.
One thing that I REALLY dislike about this kind of story is that I doubt that Ping tried to contact Pingify to start with and have a conversation. Oh, that’s right, they had whois privacy. Well there is normally still an email address that should work for the domain owner. Too often people don’t talk to domain owners and let the lawyers come out with all guns blazing. Yeah, that might work on small players like me, but a professional discussion would also work better than many realize and cost a lot less time, money, and take less of a toll in stress. I HATE getting those registered emails that I have to sign for. My advice, talk softly and carry a large legal budget.
Michael Castello says
Ping use to own GolfClub.com and let the expire in 1997. We use to get [email protected] email because that was Tiger’s email back then. At least they own Ping.com
Andrew Allemann says
@ Chris – a UDRP filing counts as a “court order” and requires the privacy service to provide the name of the real owner.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Michael – nice…didn’t realize you owned that one!