Company was founded two years after domain registered.
Zija International, a multi-level marketing company that sells nutritional and dietary supplements, has failed to get the domain name Zija.com through a UDRP.
The registrant of the domain name registered it in 2002, two years before Zija even existed.
He then used the domain name to forward to one of his web sites until 2006, which Zija threatened legal action against him. At that time, the respondent stopped using the domain but continued to renew it. Zija offered him $15,000 for the domain but he declined.
Six years later, in 2012, Zija decided to take another stab at getting the domain name. According to the panel’s decision, Zija’s attorneys wrote to the respondent and said they had “recently become aware” of the Zija.com domain name and demanded control of it. It followed up its threats by filing the UDRP in January 2013.
Sounds like reverse domain name hijacking to me.
The panel found against Zija International, but declined to find it guilty of reverse domain name hijacking despite its “misguided and ultimately incorrect” belief that it could win the UDRP.
World Star says
Stupid name.
John Berryhill says
I love the “recently became aware of” line in cut & paste c&d letters and UDRP complaints. If the name was registered before the existence of the mark, and the Complainant had registered some variation of online.com, or registered in another TLD, then you know they were perfectly well aware of the domain name when they chose their brand name, and that they are lying their asses off. OF COURSE they checked if the domain name was available in .com when they registered their “next best option” domain name. It’s such a stupid little lie.
Andrew Allemann says
@ John Berryhill – it’s even worse in this case since they sent him a c&d 6 years ago, too. So it’s a lie, even though they didn’t mean to commit a lie.
WipoSucks says
Why is it that when a respondent loosing a case is automatically a Cybersquatter, but when the claimant looses is not an automatic RDNHijacker?