Arbitrator rules against foundation on all three counts in UDRP.
The Napolean Hill Foundation has gotten rich off its namesake’s timeless “Think and Grow Rich” book. But an arbitrator with National Arbitration Forum has ruled that it doesn’t have a lock on the term “and grow rich”.
The foundation filed a claim against the owner of FlipandGrowRich.com, a web site that offers information about flipping real estate, including a book titled “Flip and Grow Rich”. The foundation argued that Flip and Grow Rich is confusingly similar to Think and Grow Rich. It also claimed that the respondent had no rights or interest in the domains:
Complainant asserts that Respondent has no legitimate rights in the flipandgrowrich.com and flipandgrowrich1.com domain names because the domain names had and have no relevance to Respondent and because Respondent is not currently known as Flip and Grow Rich apart from the domain name registrations.
This is a strange assertion to make given the content of the web sites and that the owner of the domains had authored a book by the same name.
The Napoleon Hill Foundation lost on all three counts necessary to win a UDRP decision. On the issue of confusing similarity, the arbitrator wrote:
The domain names start with the word “flip†while Complainant’s mark starts with the word “think.†The words “think†and “flip†have entirely different meanings, do not have similar sounds, and do not have similar spellings.
Hopefully the foundation’s stable of authors won’t be writing about how to make money with domain names any time soon.
Jeff Schneider says
I find this whole story totally amusing. I personally know the owner of both copyright and trademarks of Think and grow rich. Seems he is trying to make a little more money through the court system. If you are always taking more than you are giving it always seems to backfire. Thank God for natures laws, rather than lawyers laws !
Gratefully, Jeff