Edible Arrangements Should Stick to Edibles
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
with that arrangement?
Poor Edible Arrangements. All it wanted to do was swipe the domain name EdibleBrands.com. But it didn’t count on the respondent calling John Berryhill to pick apart the case.
Now that food-instead-of-flowers company Edible Arrangements, LLC is getting big, it’s apparently creating a new brand or umbrella company called Edible Brands. It filed for a trademark for “Edible Brands” in January 2009 using a “first used in commerce” of the same date. There’s only one hurdle to its plans: it doesn’t own EdibleBrands.com.
The company decided to play its hand with domain arbitration. Most complainant lawyers would pass on this case, citing that the domain was registered four years before the trademark was even used. But the company got creative: Incredibly, it decided that it had rights to the term “Edible” as it refers to food products. (Seriously, read the decision).
Since “EdibleBrands.com” is nothing but Edible Brands’ supposed “edible” trademark, plus the word “brand” and “.com”, the company made the argument that it should get the domain.
If there’s one person you can’t get B.S. past, it’s John Berryhill. First, he took so-called Edible Brands through the ringer, arguing that Edible Brands is not a holding company for Edible Arrangements nor its trademarks. Oh, and the owner of EdibleBrands.com owns lots of similar ___Brands.com domains, showing that it didn’t register the domain with the non-existent trademark in mind.
Edible Brands made another big mistake, and it’s one I’m seeing more and more often. A company approaches someone about buying a domain. The domain owner responds with a price, and then the company cites that offer as proof the domain was registered only for resale. When it files for arbitration, it neglects to mention the offer was in response to the complainant’s inquiry. Imagine how the arbitration panel feels when it finds out it’s being duped by the complainant.
The panel decided that “Edible” wasn’t confusingly similar to “EdibleBrands.com”. Even though the panel was not required to, it also decided to find that the domain wasn’t registered in bad faith.
Photo from EdibleArrangements.com
Related posts:
Edible Arrangements Should Stick to Edibles – http://tinyurl.com/cs9ndk
Edible Arrangements loses arbitration case for EdibleBrands.com via RT @domainnamewire: http://tinyurl.com/cs9ndk
Great news for the registrant and John. Congratulations and thanks for fighting for us all.
I hope this article gets some main stream media coverage and Edible is embarrassed by their behavior.
Maybe I’ll keep sending flowers
Yeah…..but again…..where the hell is the reverse domain hijacking cliam.
It seems that the panelists and lawyers (Berryhill included) does not ask for a reverse domain name hijacking ruling anymore.
Correct me if I am wrong, but that is what I am seeing.
This is a total b.s. case just like a few others recently…..but they complainants are not held liable.
This has to stop!!!!
“It seems that the panelists and lawyers (Berryhill included) does not ask for a reverse domain name hijacking ruling anymore.”
Typically, the panels ignore such requests. There was considerable bad faith behavior by the Complainant well beyond that documented in the decision, and which was most assuredly pointed out to the panel.
The UDRP requires panels, in all cases, to consider whether the complaint was brought in bad faith. UDRP providers are competitive entities, and do not encourage chastisement of their customers – i.e. the UDRP complainants.