Verizon files four separate UDRP cases in past couple days.
For a while it seemed like Verizon had basically given up on filing UDRP cases. Instead, it opted to just file lawsuits against anyone with trademark typos, even small fry.
That may be changing. The company has filed four separate UDRP cases at World Intellectual Property Organization within the past two days.
One of those cases is for wwwverizon.com – a typo that should have been at the top of Verizon’s hit list from the beginning. It almost seems that the company has been using a shotgun approach going after typosquatters, leaving the highest trafficked domains out there. Compete.com says this typo gets over 6,000 uniques a month.
Why switch to UDRP instead of lawsuits? It may be that these specific typosquatters have been hard to track down. In the case of verizonewireless.com, the whois record is constantly changing. wwwverizon.com and verzonwireless.com are owned by people in Russia and Poland, respectively.
Or perhaps, after years of filing lawsuits, the company feels its determent efforts (lawsuits) have worked on everyone else they’ll work on. Now it’s time to use a cheaper method to get control of trademark typos.
I believe companies like Verizon need to continuously protect their TMs. Just like they have full time people protecting against hackers.
You surely don’t want the IT dept working part-time.
Don’t they have guards in the corp. hdqtr around the clock?
They need to protect the term – Verizon.
But, some of their peers have gone overboard by trying to protect a term like – wireless.
(just an example.)
I assume VZ has found it is easier, quicker and cheaper to use UDRP instead of U.S. federal court when the cybersquatter is in countries that have none or very little TM enforcement.
With a UDRP, the defendant can’t counter sue for Verizon’s error traffic TM typo infringement.
The problem is that the parking companies are paying on these trademarks. If they were held accountable, there would be no payoff in it. Why should the parking companies make money on TM’s yet its the owners that get sued?
We as an industry need to start policing ourselves before the feds to it for us.
More likely those who hold the udrp’d domains structured themselves in such a way that VZ could only take the domains in a lawsuit (no cash) and any default judgement would be too hard to enforce.
VZ does their research on their targets. If there’s no money, they’ll take a portfolio. If there’s nothing to get, it looks like they’ll do the udrp.
Little bird, good point.