WIPO Panelist Calls Juice Bar’s Assertions “Mystifying”
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
Juice bar wants .com, but will have to pay for it.
A WIPO UDRP panelist has ruled against a juice bar called “Juicy Details”, calling the complainant’s assertions about bad faith registration of JuicyDetails.com “Mystifying”.
Juicy Details, based in the Netherlands, filed the complaint against Another.com, which owns JuicyDetails.com. But the panelist thought Juicy Detail’s accusations didn’t add up:
The Panel finds these assertions mystifying. From the record in this proceeding, it appears that the Complainant, a Dutch company, was only established in 2002 and operated only in the Netherlands. It applied for a Benelux trademark registration in March 2002 and did not obtain a Community Trade Mark until January 2009. The Complainant registered a domain name based on its JUICY DETAILS mark in the “.nl” country domain in March 2002, but the Complainant does not indicate when it launched a commercial website associated with that domain name. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine displays no archived copies of a website associated with the Complainant’s domain name until 2003, when the page simply displayed a message in Dutch to the effect that a website would appear “shortly”. There is no evidence in the record that the Complainant operated or advertised in the United Kingdom, where the Respondent is located, in 2002. Thus, it is not clear how the Respondent would have been aware of the Complainant’s mark in May 2002, when it registered the Domain Name in the United Kingdom, unless it examined the records of Benelux trademark applications. The Panel does not read the Policy as requiring such an investigation.
The Respondent denies prior knowledge of the Complainant or its mark, and this is plausible in the circumstances. Moreover, the mark consists of two English dictionary words, commonly used as a phrase to denote gossip or titillating information.
Why is Juicy Details interested in the .com? It operates at JuicyDetails.nl, and wants to expand outside the Netherlands.
Further Reading:
One can only dream of RDNH.
Given Benelux Trademarks are given out by the shedload to anyone who asks – perhaps it would be worth condsidering that they should require formal substantiation of underlying goods and services before they can be used to bring a UDRP?
Z”One can only dream of RDNH.”
…with some teeth.