Popular clothing outlet finds Seventy-seven to be an unlucky number.
A National Arbitration Forum panel has found that clothing retailer American Eagle is not entitled to the domain name SeventySeven.com, despite the domain owner showing clothing pay-per-click links on the domain name.
Retail Royalty Company’s American Eagle stores have a clothing line with the 77 mark.
The decision came down to whether or not the domain name owner should have known about American Eagle’s mark when it registered the domain name and thus registered it in bad faith. The clothier filed its trademark before the domain was registered but the trademark wasn’t granted until a couple years later.
The panel ruled that this timeline, coupled with the respondent living outside the U.S., was enough to place more burden on American Eagle to prove that the domain name was registered in bad faith:
Complainant may thus draw comfort from the fact that the date of filing of its trademark registration application with the USPTO came before the registration of Respondent’s domain name. However, we must also consider that the filing date of Complainant’s trademark registration application was separated in time from the registration of Respondent’s domain name by only a matter of several months, taken together with the fact that Complainant is a United States company while Respondent does business half a world away in Hong Kong. These circumstances require that Complainant demonstrate by concrete proof that Respondent knew or had strong reason to know of its 77 mark rights at the time the domain name was registered…
Of course you could also argue that SeventySeven.com doesn’t look anything like the complainant’s mark for 77.
This isn’t the first “number” domain name to be decided in a UDRP. In fact, domain name attorney John Berryhill has won three of them himself: the present case, zero.us, and 187.com.
Leave a Comment