A reasonable lawsuit but someone forgot to do a domain lookup.
Hair care products company It’s a 10, Inc. has sued the owners of Its-a-ten.com and Its-a-10.com for trademark infringement.
According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs allegedly used the domain names to sell It’s a 10 haircare products and then threatened to divert customers if the site’s distributor could no longer sell It’s a 10 products to it.
OK, pretty straightforward. But that’s not the interesting part.
It’s a 10, Inc. uses the domain name ItsA10HairCare.com. I assumed it would own ItsaTen.com if it could.
But at the time of writing, ItsaTen.com is available!
Oh, and it also doesn’t own ItsaTenHaircare.com.
You’d think that, while you were filing a federal lawsuit for trademark infringement, you’d also check to make sure your domain name strategy was in order.
BedHair says
good Monday morning laugh. Next we’ll find out they could have bought it for $100. 🙂
Louise says
You’re going to publish available hand regs with the piranhas circling around here?
I emailed the company – hope they get the hand regs before someone else!
On a side note, many companies make similar mistakes. Now that I am exposed to the domain industry, I alerted a NBCUniveral about what looks like an oversight, and they responded.
Michael says
Seems they will have to start a dialog with a guy from Vietnam now…
Locking C-Clamp Pliers says
So now they are Piranhas instead of Investors…..LOL.
Piranha says
“It’s a ten” would be a good domain name for a hot or not clone
Gnanes says
ItsATen.com has been registered by a TM squatter “Thi Thanh Nguyen”. search on google site:domaintools.com “Thi Thanh Nguyen” and you’ll see the typo of TMs like Google, Microsoft, ESPN, & More.
Ricky Balboa says
love it
get the popcorn one more time lol
Louise says
Then I’m a piranha, too, because I’m a domain investor.
You know what I mean, someone who would register a trademark name to squeeze the business doesn’t speak well for domaining.
Marg says
Their lawsuit blurb says that they have been in business since 2006 and are now a “multi million dollar company”. Guess they were trying to save a few of those dollars by not employing anyone in their corporate legal department who knew the first thing about domains and branding then. The ItsATen.com domain shows on archive.org as having been around since 2003. Presumably it must have dropped at some point for it to be available to register when Andrew wrote this article. Don’t tell me that It’s A Ten Haircare had it originally and let it drop..?