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Clothing company fails to upgrade domain name through UDRP

by — Policy & Law 2 Comments

Clothing company goes after shorter domain name through UDRP.

Image of LittleJonesiesCo.com website showing kids clothes

This clothing company tried to upgrade its domain from LittleJonesiesCo.com to LittleJonesies.com through UDRP. It failed.

A kids and women’s clothing company has lost a cybersquatting dispute against the domain LittleJonesies.com, which is owned by someone with the last name Jones.

The Complainant, Little Jonesies LLC, uses the domain name LittleJonesiesCo.com.

David Jones of Idaho registered the domain in January 2016.

Little Jonesies LLC filed trademarks for the term in 2017 but claimed first use in commerce of 2015.

Interestingly, the company didn’t register its own domain name until April 2016, after LittleJonesies.com was registered. It might have just been using third-party ecommece platforms like Etsy without its own domain name.

In its complaint, the clothing seller didn’t address the fact that the registrant’s last name is Jones, which is a decent tip-off that it might have rights or legitimate interests in the domain.

Jones didn’t make a formal reply in the case but said he registered the domain with plans to start a business. He could have just as easily said he registered it because he has kids and it would suffice as a legitimate interest.

The Complainant also failed to provide any evidence that the domain was used in bad faith. It resolved to an error page at the time the complaint was filed.

Panelist David H. Bernstein did not consider reverse domain name hijacking. Thorpe North & Western LLP represented the Complainant.

DigitalTown let its domain names expire

by — Uncategorized 22 Comments

Company drops new top level domains as it becomes a shell company.

DigitalTown SEC filing image

DigitalTown, Inc. filed its delayed 10-K yesterday. It covers the fiscal year ending February 28, 2019.

The annual report discloses that the Company is no longer acquiring or renewing its domain name portfolio. It had $0 in renewal fees during the fiscal year, so many of these domains have already expired. At one point, it had 13,000 .city domain names.

DigitalTown also appears to have wound down most of its “Domain Marketing Development Obligations” in which new top level domain registries paid DigitalTown to register their domain names.

The company has sold off all of its revenue-generating assets and is effectively a shell company. It owes lots of money to creditors, which it hopes to pay off with nearly worthless stock. Shares (OTC: DGTW) last traded yesterday at $.0006. (Hey, it was up 50% on the day!)

Many of the acquisitions the company made in recent years were paid with stock. Assuming the owners didn’t liquidate this stock earlier, they have been wiped out.

 

Sports equipment company guilty of reverse domain name hijacking

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

Panel finds Singapore company brought case in abuse of UDRP.

Reverse domain name hijacking graphic

A World Intellectual Property Organization panel has found Sport and Fashion, Pte. Ltd., a sports equipment/apparel company, guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.

The company filed a cybersquatting complaint against the domain demix.com. It markets a brand called Demix.

Canadian company St. Lawrence Cement Inc owns the domain name. It markets cement products under the Demix brand.

The cement company registered the domain in 1998, well before the Complainant had any trademark rights to the term.

Based on the panel decision, it appears the Complainant might have copied-and-pasted information from another UDRP filing into this one:

The Complaint appears to have been prepared with very little attention to detail and as noted above includes erroneous references to a completely unrelated trademark. Once the intended respondent was identified as being a Canadian company likely to be involved in the cement business (given its name), it ought to have been obvious to the Complainant that the Respondent was likely to have independently coined the Disputed Domain Name. If the Complainant was in any way unclear on this issue, a few minutes Internet searching would have found the Respondent’s present web sites at for example “www.demixbeton.ca”. Similarly a search of the Canadian Trademarks Registry would have found a number of DEMIX-related trademarks predating the Complainant’s trademark – whilst these are in various corporate names this should nevertheless have alerted the Complainant to the potential difficulties with its case.

 

NamesCon picks The Capital Factory for 2020 show in Austin

by — Services 0 Comments

Event chooses startup accelerator for its 2020 U.S. event.

Picture of an event at The Capital Factory in downtown Austin, Texas

The Capital Factory in Austin, Texas.

NamesCon has finalized the date and location details for its 2020 conference.

The event will take place January 26-29 in Austin, TX. Much of the action will take place at The Capital Factory, a business accelerator.

The Capital Factory is in a unique building that is half business offices and half hotel — The Omni. I suspect that The Omni will be the key hotel for guests.

It’s not a big space for a conference, so keynotes, partner workshops and the live domain auction will take place outside Capital Factory, perhaps in the Omni. It could also take place at the office of some of the companies that are just a few blocks away, such as GoDaddy and WPEngine.

Hosting the exhibit hall and various workshops in the incubator presents an interesting opportunity. Exhibitors and the domain industry want to reach end users, and Capital Factory is full of startups. That means exhibitors and speakers can reach a new audience in addition to domain investors.

NamesCon is calling the event “The Domain Economic Forum,” a nod to trying to pull in sponsors and guests that do more than service domain names. It wants companies that are tangentially related, too.

Early bird tickets are available for $349.

Scratch.org update and subpoenas

by — Policy & Law 9 Comments

Here’s why domain investors got subpoena notices from Enom.

Picture of Subpoena document

There’s been a lot of talk in domain circles today about subpoena notices for domains at Enom.

The subpoena stems from a lawsuit that Scratch Foundation, a non-profit created at MIT, filed against the domain name Scratch.org.

Scratch Foundation filed the case as in rem (meaning against the domain), but Ravi Lahoti stepped forward as the owner. Lahoti says he’s owned the domain name since 1998. DomainTools historical Whois records seem to corroborate his story, at least until Scratch Foundation was formed, although the domain has bounced around different entities/privacy services.

This brings us to the subpoena, which you can view here (pdf). Attorney David Weslow, who is representing Scratch Foundation, asked Enom for a list of Lahoti’s domains. The original subpoena was quite a bit broader than that, but these things are often narrowed between the lawyer and recipient. Regardless, Enom has apparently notified anyone who owns a domain that was at any point tied to Lahoti.

It seems that Weslow is trying to paint Lahoti as a serial cybersquatter.

Indeed, in a recent order (pdf), the judge wrote “Plaintiff has also brought various other anticybersquatting cases against Mr. Lahoti to the Court’s attention which demonstrate that Mr.
Lahoti is a notorious cybersquatter.”

Whether or not Lahoti is a notorious cybersquatter shouldn’t matter on the claim under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act so long as Lahoti proves that he owned the domain before Scratch Foundation had rights in the mark. This seems like it will be easy to do.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle in the lawsuit: it also claims trademark infringement. Should Scratch Foundation show that prior ads on Scratch.org infringed on its trademarks, could it win a judgment against the domain? I’m not familiar with how a judgment for trademark infringement works in an in rem case. But it’s clear that the trademark infringement claim is part of the effort to get control of the domain.

There’s a lesson here involving in rem lawsuits. Lahoti asked the court to name Lahoti as the defendant instead of in rem. This might make it easier to defend but also opens him up to personal liability. The court denied this request on the basis that Lahoti didn’t object early enough to in rem jurisdiction.