National Car Rental Fails to Show Rights in National.com Typo
Friday, September 10th, 2010
An interesting UDRP case for car rental chain.
Vanguard Trademark Holding, which holds the trademarks for National Car Rental, has failed to win the domain name Natonal.com in a UDRP. This is despite:
- Natonal.com resolving to a parked page full of ads for car rental
- The domain owner not responding to the UDRP
So why did Vanguard fail? It based its premise primarily on Natonal.com being confusingly similar to the company’s “National Car Rental” mark. The panelist pointed out that Natonal might be confusingly similar to National, but it’s not similar at all to the full three word mark. Vanguard argued it had rights to “National” as well, but apparently the lawyer didn’t focus on this and didn’t submit evidence. So Vanguard didn’t even clear the first hurdle of a UDRP.
Here’s something else that’s interesting. If anything, Natonal.com is a typo of National.com, which National Car Rental doesn’t even own! National.com is owned by National Semiconductor. Yes, it’s clear that the parked page at Natonal.com is targeting people looking for the car rental company, but can you imagine if an arbitration panel handed over a typo of a third party’s URL just because of how it was targeting ads?
Further Reading:
- For National Car Rental, Green Means Stop Using Your Domain Name
- Guy Sues Alamo Car Rental After Losing UDRP
- Nationnal.com and Natiional.com – One is a Trademark Typo, the Other Isn’t
Tags: udrp
And yet a lawyer somewhere got paid.
^ haha exactly. Why doesn’t someone show these companies how much money they are losing on their futile legal battles. They are sad vultures chasing after typos that aren’t worth half of what they are being paid to secure. I’d advise National to cut the legal woes, and save themselves well over 6 figures annually.
Ditto what Rob said.
Ever noticed there aren’t any ‘no win no fee’ IP lawyers?