Arkansas Company Spills Hot Coffee on Rival’s Domain Name Claims

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Respondent in domain dispute successful against rival online coffee retailer.

Coffee SpillAn Arkansas company has successfully defended a domain arbitration case brought against it by a rival online coffee retailer.

Discount Coffee.com Inc. filed an arbitration case against WCM Investments of Arkansas, which operates Coffee.org. WCM had registered the domain names discount-coffee.net, discountcoffee.net, and discountedcoffee.com to drive traffic to Coffee.org, and DiscountCoffee.com argued that WCM was trading on its goodwill by using the allegedly confusingly similar domain names. But it was unable to convince the arbitrator that the domains were registered in bad faith and that the respondent didn’t have rights or legitimate interests in them.

There’s an important lesson here for companies that use a generic domain name: it doesn’t give you rights to all variations of your name. That’s why it’s important to pick up your name in other top level domain names (and variants in .com) if you want to keep the competition from getting them. If only AOL’s Advertising.com understood that.

Further Reading:

  1. Insurance company claims rights to AutoOwner.com and others

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7 Comments » - Posted in Policy & Law by

Comments

  1. Latest Domainer News
    October 22nd, 2009 | 12:13 pm

    Arkansas Company Spills Hot Coffee on Rival?s Domain Name Claims – http://tinyurl.com/ygcr44o

  2. johnon.com
    October 22nd, 2009 | 1:01 pm

    Still think you don't need the .org and .net? http://tinyurl.com/ygcr44o

  3. M. Menius
    October 22nd, 2009 | 3:03 pm

    If only there were a real “financial penalty” for a complainant losing a UDRP or for a finding of reverse domain hijacking. Then they would spend a little more time researching the validity of their claim. The UDRP is so cheap, they figure it’s worth a roll of the dice.

  4. Sumit Bahl
    October 22nd, 2009 | 6:17 pm

    This was a pretty fair judgment IMO.

  5. EuropeanDomainCentre
    October 23rd, 2009 | 8:09 am

    Generic domain cases are not won easily, evcen though they appear a lot. As Europeandomaincentre.com we could never request back europeandomain.com even if it was registered in bad faith – too generic. Check the domain disputes at wipo.org to see some examples

  6. BuySellDomains
    October 23rd, 2009 | 10:23 am

    RT @dnnews: Arkansas Company Spills Hot Coffee on Rival's Domain Name Claims – http://tinyurl.com/ygcr44o

  7. LiveDrive buys LiveCloud.com for $92,000 and 10 other domain sales - Domain Name Wire
    December 7th, 2011 | 11:36 am

    [...] coffee company that has successfully defended against a UDRP claim bought MonthlyCoffeeClub.com for [...]

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