Clothing company tried to get Milano.com through UDRP.
Grupo Milano, S.A., owner of clothing stores in Mexico, has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name Milano.com.
The company made some rather ridiculous claims in the UDRP it filed with World Intellectual Property Organization.
It tried to buy the domain name through Sedo. A Sedo broker told Grupo Milano that its offer would likely not be accepted because the value of the domain name was estimated to be about EUR 50,000. The clothing company responded:
Based on the Complainant’s research, the average value of a domain name is USD 268, according to various other websites.
Grupo Milano also claimed:
The Respondent placed a robots.txt file in the root directory of the website to which the Disputed Domain Name resolves, which can be evidence of bad faith.
I sure hope this isn’t the full claim it made to the panel, because every site should have a robots.txt file. Perhaps it meant that it blocked search engines through robots.txt.
The complainant also pointed to the respondent’s registration of mexico-city.net as proof that the respondent likely knew of the clothing company’s trademarks. What this actually shows is that the respondent registers a lot of geo domain names. After all, Milano.com is a geo domain name for the Italian city English speakers refer to as Milan.
John Berryhill says
The robots.txt thing is a zombie argument that pops up in UDRP disputes from time to time, as a consequence of an uninformed but influential panelist who, in a case long ago, was unable to see results from archive.org in an effort to determine historical use of the domain name, and engaged in a paranoid belief that it was some kind of mechanism designed specifically to frustrate him. Entirely ignorant of its purpose, he proposed that it was some sort of “bad faith” factor.
The unwind of that absurdity is here: http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2009/d2009-1580.html
Shahram says
I should just make a website with really low real estate prices and make claims that “other websites” value the home to be less.
GRISS says
Ha ha ha, totally ridiculous claims ! And I am the 100th grandchild of the 1st Emperor of Milano, so the domain belongs to me !