New York photographer must give up domain name with spoof Absolut Vodka ad.

A joint with your Absolut Vodka?

V&S Vin & Sprit Aktiebolag, the company behind Absolut Vodka and its iconic advertising campaigns, has won the transfer of the domain name AbsolutCannabis.com from a New York photographer.

Brantley Carroll registered the domain name and published a mock Absolut ad on the site for Absolut Cannabis.

He apparently offered copies of the mock ad for sale through the web site.

Now the site — which will disappear from the web within 10 days — says it is meant to be satire about alcoholism and drugs.

The site’s title now reads “POP CULTURE SATIRE ABSOLUT VODKA Photographer has deadly message on alcoholism and race!”

Carroll writes:

THIS PAGE WAS CREATED AS SATIRE AND AS AN EDITORIAL PIECE ON BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS IN AMERICA. IF YOU ARE BLACK IN AMERICA AND A TEENAGER YOU ARE 12 TIMES AS LIKELY TO BE ARRESTED FOR MARIJUANA THAN A WHITE KID THE SAME AGE. MEANWHILE ALCOHOL PRODUCING COMPANYS MAKING A FORTUNE ADVERTISING HARD SPIRITS IN TOUGH INNER CITY NEIGHBORHOODS…

A National Arbitration Forum panel ruled that, by offering the poster for sale, Carroll had clearly registered the domain name in bad faith.

What would the outcome have been had he not offered the poster for sale through the web site?

This UDRP decision is missing a few details.

I was curious about a recent National Arbitration Forum case for boston-opera-house.org and clicked over to read the opinion granting the domain name to Boston Opera House Ventures, L.L.C.

The decision is exactly 185 words (about the size of my typical blog post) and seems to cut out everything between the parties to the last sentence or two of bad faith.

A cut and paste job gone awry? Someone hit the delete key? I dunno, but I suspect it will be fixed soon. So here’s a PDF of the decision.

Until then, you can read the “decision” here.

Group questions if ICANN’s compliance operations are up to the task with new TLDs on the horizon.

JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, made up mostly of job board operators, is calling into question ICANN’s commitment to contract compliance after ICANN gave a short reprieve to .jobs operator Employ Media.

ICANN sent a breach notice to Employ Media in February, giving it 30 days to cure two major breaches. The first was what ICANN calls lax rules for registering .jobs domains, and the second for a program creating tens of thousands of job boards at second level .jobs domains.

This came as a shock to Employ Media, as ICANN’s board had basically improved the latter scheme.

30 days have passed and now ICANN is giving Employ Media a reprieve and is working with the group to amend its charter to come into compliance.

JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition says that Employ Media continued to register thousands of second level domains for its job board sites even after receiving ICANN’s breach notice.

The Coalition writes:

Given ICANN’s unequivocal condemnation of Employ Media’s prohibited conduct and the ongoing detriment it is causing to members of the global Internet community, ICANN’s unwillingness to enforce even an incontrovertible case of contractual non-compliance raises significant questions about the wisdom of introducing hundreds of new gTLDs at this time. When Employ Media chose to respond by publicly accusing ICANN of duplicity and refusing to take any action to come into compliance during the initial – and ample – thirty day “cure period,” ICANN inexplicably rewarded the registry operator for its hostile response by granting it an extension until April 15, 2011.

Indeed, it seems that ICANN’s contractual compliance program is in disarray. A new leader is coming on board, but I hope they can clean it up before new TLDs launch.

“Copyright Troll” domain name suspended due to invalid whois information.

Copyright enforcer Righthaven LLC has been punked thanks to allegedly invalid whois information.

The company’s web site Righthaven.com currently shows an invalid whois notice from Go Daddy.

Anyone can make a complaint about invalid whois information. In Go Daddy’s case, the company sends a notice to the customer and gives them time to respond (assuming the email doesn’t bounce right away). If the domain owner doesn’t respond then the domain gets suspended and the customer is charged $10.

That’s what happened in this case.

I just got off the phone with Righthaven founder Steven Gibson. I explained what is going on (he wasn’t aware yet), and discovered that the email address on the whois was invalid.

Righthaven has been lambasted for its aggressive lawsuits, including its request that sites with copyright-infringing material hand over their domain names. So it’s a bit ironic.

It’s probably no big loss for Righthaven, though. A recent cache of its web site doesn’t show any content. But it’s possible the company uses it for email.

(via @rhvictims and DNN)

Porsche wins dispute over IDN.

Porsche has won a UDRP for the domain name порше.com, which is xn--e1arcf4b.com in punycode.

The company claims that the internationalized domain name translates as “Porsche”.

This case created some challenges for the panel. There have been numerous UDRP cases involving IDNs, but each panel needs to grapple with an arbitration system created before the use of IDNs. Facing this issue, the panel wrote:

In this case, the disputed domain name is not visually similar or identical to the Complainant’s mark. The Complainant claims that the disputed domain name is phonetically similar to its mark. However, in the Panel’s view, it does not follow from the Complainant’s evidence that the disputed domain name transcribes the sound of its mark in Cyrillic. Is it, for example, phonetically similar in Russian to the way its mark would sound in German or English? The Complainant does not say. Regardless, the Complainant provided evidence that the disputed domain name is a transliteration of its PORSCHE mark. The Complainant’s mark is very well-known, and this is recognized in a series of prior decisions under the Policy in the Complainant’s favor… The number of prior cases under the Policy involving the Complainant’s mark is itself an indication that the Complainant is an attractive target for cybersquatters.