Tignes loses domain name dispute for Tignes.com.

Ah, France. Beautiful vistas, tasty food, and governments that think they have all rights to their city names.

Following in the footsteps of Paris, Tignes has lost a UDRP for the domain name Tignes.com.

Commune de Tignes originally filed a complaint against the domain owners in Tribunal de grande instance de Lyon (French Court), arguing that the domain name infringed the Complainant’s figurative trademark TIGNES. In 2001 the court dismissed the commune’s claim.

Fast forward to 2010 and Tignes, apparently not realizing that Paris has lost similar cases, tried its hand at UDRP. A one person panel ruled that the domain name was not registered and used in bad faith and that its owners had rights or legitimate interests in the domain. Currently the owners have an informational web site that does not include ads.

The panelist stopped short of finding reverse domain name hijacking against Commune de Tignes, citing a lack of evidence put forth by the respondents.

CAC’s “supplemental rules” change goes into effect today.

Czech Arbitration Court’s new UDRP procedure — in which complainants pay only 500 EUR at first unless the domain owner responds or the arbitrator needs to think about the case — goes into effect today.

As far as I can tell, ICANN has not responded or issued a statement on Czech Arbitration Court’s (CAC) move. I’ll cut ICANN some slack here, given that CAC announced the new scheme just 15 days ago, and didn’t notify anyone publicly other than placing a notice in the news section of its web site. The 15 day window was conveniently timed for when ICANN’s staff packed up and headed to Kenya for its meeting, another gentle slap to ICANN’s face.

I’ve personally reached out to ICANN, as has Internet Commerce Association, to see what ICANN plans to do about this abuse.

Is ICANN in a new era of leadership where it actually has a spine? Or will it just brush this abuse of power under the table? If it doesn’t do anything, expect WIPO and National Arbitration Forum to follow CAC’s lead soon.

CAC is the newest UDRP provider for domain name arbitration. It hasn’t issued a decision since November 30, 2009 when it rejected a complaint against Kevin Ham’s company Vertical Axis over the domain name CityDating.com.

Baby products company loses fight with bisexual dating site.

UPDATED: Lamprecht AG, which owns the bibi brand of childrens products, has lost its attempt to get the domain name bibibaby.com. What makes this even more interesting is that the domain name was originally registered for a bisexual dating site.

The owner of the domain name stated that she registered the domain name because “‘bibibaby is in fact a word play in English referring both to bisexuality and to the well known song ‘Byebye Baby’”. She provided proof of the domain name’s use for a bisexual dating site when she registered it back in 2002. The web site had bugs and was removed about a year later, and the domain name no longer resolves.

Although everyone agreed that the complainant has a mark for bibi, the WIPO UDRP panel found that the domain owner has rights and a legitimate interest in the domain name, and that it wasn’t registered in bad faith. Further, the complainant appeared to have only brought the complaint after failing to buy the domain name. Also curious was Lamprecht’s registration of Bibi-Baby.com just a week before filing the complaint.

With regards to reverse domain name hijacking, panelist Alistair Payne wrote:

This is a classic case in which the parties operate in separate fields of activity and where the Respondent has acted independently and legitimately to register the Disputed Domain Name for a real business activity. Although, the Complainant may be concerned that people might, at least initially, associate it with the Disputed Domain Name or with the Respondent, the Policy was only designed to address circumstances of cybersquatting and not complaints of possible tarnishment. Although the Complainant appears to have sat on its hands for a number of years it only initiated this Complaint after the Respondent failed to respond to its attempts to acquire the Disputed Domain Name. Further, the Panel is not satisfied that the Complainant was aware at the time of filing of the Respondent’s initial website and business offering. Accordingly the Panel declines to make a finding of reverse domain name hijacking.

This case was over before it even began.

I was scratching my head when I saw that someone had filed a UDRP against the owner of PaperSnowflake.com. Who in the world would go after a generic name like that?

We now have the answer, but I’m still scratching my head.

Patricia Kelley, who owns PaperSnowflakes.com (plural), filed the case. She operates a web site that instructs people on how to create paper snowflakes. With the help of counsel, she tried to argue that she had common law rights in Papersnowflakes.com, and that the singular version was confusingly similar.

The panel didn’t buy it, and Kelley didn’t even meet the first requirement to win a UDRP.

What’s amazing to me is that the owner of PaperSnowflakes.com apparently offered to sell the domain to Kelley for $2,000. That’s a great price, and the domain would probably fetch at least that much on the market. It’s also probably less than what she spent filing the UDRP and hiring a lawyer.

The respondent asked for a finding of reverse domain name hijacking. Panelist Alistair Payne neglected to consider the issue.

News network wants Spanish domain name.

Cable News Network, aka CNN, wants to get its hands on the CNN.es domain name. There’s just one problem: it was registered back in 2005. So the company has filed a domain dispute with World Intellectual Property Organization to try to get the domain name.

At the time of writing CNN.es doesn’t resolve to a web site. But the domain’s owner appears to be based in the United Kingdom if his email address is any any indication. (.Es is the country code for Spain.)

This isn’t the first time CNN has challenged domain names through domain arbitration. It filed 8 cases last decade, winning all 8 of them. However, this appears to be the first challenge the company has made for a second level domain name merely containing “CNN” in a country code domain.

CNN knows the value of a good domain name, even if belatedly. In 2008 the company ponied up $700,000 for the domain name iReport.com. CNN had made the iReport brand valuable thanks to its crowdsourced news program by the same name.