Mirabella Beauty Products Guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking

Panel not impressed with beauty company’s claims.

California beauty products company Mirabella Beauty Products, LLC has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking by a three person arbitration panel.

The company filed a complaint with National Arbitration Forum for the domain name Mirabella.com, but had some major holes in its argument. In its decision, the panel wrote:

Here, the Respondent urges a declaration of reverse domain name hijacking on the ground that the Complaint asserted the Respondent’s bad faith while failing to address the fact that the Domain Name was first registered several years before the Complainant began to use its marks…This is an egregious oversight, and the Complainant did not cite any evidence that the Respondent itself acquired the Domain Name after the Complainant’s mark was established…

Apart from the Complainant’s failure to deal with the obvious timing issue for the third element of the Complaint, there is another fundamental issue that was entirely in the Complainant’s power to disclose and address. The Complaint is based on trademark registrations on the USPTO Supplemental Register. The Complaint fails to mention this critical fact or supply evidence of distinctiveness sufficient for common law protection. Thus, the Complainant filed a Complaint lacking even the minima for grounding a UDRP proceeding.

The Panel concludes, therefore, that the Complaint was filed in bad faith within the meaning of paragraph 15(e) of the Rules and constitutes an abuse of the UDRP proceeding.

Mirabella Beauty’s lawyers were Kleinberg & Lerner, LLP.

The respondent was Mrs Jello, LLC, a well-known domainer. Case details are available here.

Update: this isn’t Mirabella Beauty’s only UDRP loss. It previously tried to get iMirabella.com and lost.