Financial Firm Loses Bid for OVB.com

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Arbitrator rules against large financial firm trying to get three character domain name.

A World Intellectual Property Organization arbitrator has ruled against OVB Vermögensberatung AG of Köln, a financial firm based in Germany, in a dispute over the domain name OVB.com. The arbitrator decided that it was not clear the domain was registered and used in bad faith.

Working against the respondent, Michele Dinoia, was that he has been on the losing end of a number of UDRP cases involving big brand names. He has lost cases for Ford-credit.com, DatelineNBC.com, wwwAutoZone.com, and many others.

However, the arbitrator decided there wasn’t proof that Dinoia registered this particular name with the financial firm OVB in mind. In fact, OVB pointed out that the parked domain name included links related to a cutlery company called “Our Very Best”. Thus, the cutlery manufacturer may have been able to prove it was targeted, but the financial firm couldn’t.

As the Complainant has noted, between 1900 and World War II Camillus Cutlery, one of the oldest knife manufacturers in the United States, produced a well known line of knives under the brand OVB (an acronym for “Our Very Best”). Camillus resurrected the OVB brand use in the early 2000’s and obtained a United States trademark registration for OVB OUR VERY BEST on March 19, 2002. Two months later, the Respondent in May 2002 registered and began using the disputed domain name with a portal site containing advertising links for knives and cutlery. That this is sheer coincidence strikes the Panel as somewhat unlikely, particularly in light of prior decisions suggesting that the Respondent has targeted third-party trademarks on more than one occasion in the past. If this were the case here, however, it would appear that the Respondent was targeting Camillus Cutlery’s trademark rights rather than the Complainant’s trademark when registering the disputed domain name.

(Case decision here.)

Further Reading:

  1. Financial Firm Guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking
  2. Firm Wants to Be “Your Lawyer” (and Wants the Domain Names, Too)
  3. Dubai Law Firm Nailed for Reverse Domain Name Hijacking

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2 Comments » - Posted in Policy & Law by

Comments

  1. Domain Name Wire » News » Financial Firm Loses Bid for OVB.com … |
    May 21st, 2009 | 8:42 am

    [...] posted here: Domain Name Wire » News » Financial Firm Loses Bid for OVB.com … Tagged: firm-based, including-one, obama, products-as-varied, property-organization, [...]

  2. Chris
    May 21st, 2009 | 8:54 am

    These 3 letter UDRP’s should be thrown out no matter what the circimstances.

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