Shoddy work by Target’s lawyers may have let domain owner off the hook.
Domain attorney Paul Keating has successfully defended Quinv S.A. against Target Brands and a UDRP it filed over Taget.com.
Now, first things first: Taget.com isn’t necessarily a typo of Target.com. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to own this domain and ways you can use it without running afoul of cybersquatting rules.
But Target claimed the domain forwarded through a series of URLs to Target.com.
After it filed its case this behavior apparently stopped.
But I just checked and the domain name sent me to Target.com through Sendori’s zero click service.
Quinv asserted that it wasn’t aware of what its parking provider (named as Sedo) may have been doing with the domain. It looks like the domain has been parked with Above.com’s parking service since at least the beginning of the year.
Furthermore, Quinv asserted in its defense that it’s not a “professional” domainer “and presumed that placing the Domain Name with SEDO and other monetizing providers would result in a directory page contextually related to the actual use of the word.”
Target called B.S. on this, noting that Quinv’s web page states little more than “Domain Investors” and “Domain Experts”.
I’m surprised the panelists didn’t call Quinv out on this. It’s also worth noting that DomainTools shows that Quinv’s email address is associated with 628 domains. That’s another strike against it’s notion that it doesn’t know what it’s doing.
The panel ruled against Target Brands in the case. I think there were a couple reasons the case ended up this way: Target’s lawyers didn’t understand exactly what it was doing, and the panelists didn’t understand how the domain was forwarded to Target either (to which you should blame Target’s lawyers).
Had Target’s lawyer been able to ascertain that the domain was parked on a domain optimization/rotating service, that it was sending traffic through Sendori, and noticed the number of domains Quinv owned, the result may have been very different. (It took me about 60 seconds to determine all of this.)
You know what would be the ultimate irony in this case? If Target was actually the Sendori customer buying traffic. That’s more likely than you might imagine.
Jim says
I pulled up the domain and it went to Target through Sendori, which Above offers.
James says
I might be missing something, Andrew, but I don’t read in your summary any alleged actions by Quinv that would rise to the level of awarding the domain to Target in a UDRP. If I understand what you’re saying, Sedo was causing these offending links unbeknownst to the registrant; but if they were actively trying to milk revenue off a typo, then that would be a different story.
In general, it seems that Quinv bought a domain name that (while addmittedly might be a typo of “Target”) could be a brandable name on its own merit. In addition, it’s a surname, and in Swedish means “roof.” A great short domain name.
(And that info wasn’t easy for me to find out.) In a search for “Taget” on Google, I had pages of misguided search results for Target instead. I had to literally put the word in quotes in order to get the correct results, and most google users probably don’t know to do this. Why does google show these results instead of Taget? Well, it’s not the registrant’s fault.
It’s kind of like what ADM is doing to all the small-time farmers who don’t want to plant ADM patented crops. The little farmers can’t keep or sell their own seeds for next year because they have been contaminated by the patented crops all around them.
I think the enormous marketing efforts and success of Target has caused this otherwise viable domain name and word to be “contaminated” by the internet overspill of the retail behemoth. And to suffer because of it.
It is not the registrant’s fault that parking sites like Sedo can automatically assign offending keywords to domains that will set off a trademark holder. I think that automated trademark or generic keyword traffic (based on the domain name) should be disabled by default at parking sites like Sedo (just show general advertising), and then only activated when keywords are approved or created by the domain holder.
Until then, unless a registrant is actively trying to steal traffic through keyword optimization of a typo and the like, the blame, if any, should fall squarely on the parking companies in cases like this.
I park the majority of my inventory at Sedo because when parked, they claim they will will increase their marketing efforts for the sale of the domain, and will charge a lower commission if sold. It’s certainly not for the parking revenue.
There are too many similarities between an ever shrinking pool of available .com domains. And at the same time questionable UDRP’s are on the rise.
Andrew Allemann says
@ James – there are two points in here.
First, panels mostly rule that you’re responsible for what your parking company does, assuming you signed up with the company. You can’t just say “my parking company put those ads up there without my knowledge”
Second, in this case it wasn’t merely an ad for Target — the entire domain name forwarded to Target!
Lori says
There should be other remedies than domain trasnfers, like, tell registrant to stop. How does it make sense that the remedy for a 100$ domain is the same as the remedy for a 1M domain? And what about the obvious conflict of interest of the complainant in filing when the remedy is a full transfer? You think they don’t make up stuff? The system is against domain holders and we learned to blindly accept and live with it. We’re the frog in the boiling water.
help says
The attorney, Paul Keating is on the investor Board of Domain Tools as is the owner of EuroDNS, Xavier Buck. According to linkedin from google cache the one and only employee of Quinv was also the sales director of EURODNS. According to Google’s cache and whois queries Quinv owns over 12,000 domain including craigslkst.com, wikipedi.com, and fgoogl.com.
http://whoissecurity.com/historical-whois-data-look-who-sells-it/
Josh says
Just a coincidence lol
Dave Zan says
Nothing is going to stop a determined registrant, especially one waaaaaaaay outside the complainant’s physical reach.
Over Reaching says
Here we go again, yet more evidence of over reaching tm holders monopolizing a broken udrp system…..opps, wait a second here