Which ads show up on a parked page can make the difference in a UDRP.
Yesterday WIPO posted its decision in a UDRP for the DriveUPS.com domain name, finding in favor of the shipping company UPS and ordering the domain name transferred.
This decision did not hinge on the fact that the domain was parked with ads related to shipping and delivery. It had more to do with the domain owner reaching out to UPS to try to sell it the domain name.
But the parked page ads certainly didn’t help. Had the registrant had not tried to sell the domain to UPS, the panel surely would have focused on the parked page.
The domain owner tried to make the defense that “driveups” were “nostalgic places of yesteryear.” That would be a plausible argument if the parked page wasn’t full of ads for Fedex and UPS jobs.
Yet this doesn’t mean that the safest thing to do to avoid a UDRP loss is not park your domain. On the contrary, parking a domain can actually help you in a UDRP if you do it right.
I’ve read several decisions involving Frank Schilling in which the panel found that Schilling had legitimate interests in the domain because he was using it to derive advertising revenue from the generic meaning of the domain.
So had he owner of Driveups.com had ads for, say, Sonic, then it could have tipped the argument that the domain was registered for its generic meaning in his favor (had he not proactively tried to sell the domain).
Karen Bernstein says
This is something I’ve talked about over and over again. Domain owners must be proactive in the way that they use parked pages. Shop around and see which parking companies offer “negative keywords” to avoid an unscrupulous trademark holder from using the search box on a parked page to generate ads that are related to their products or services.