German company goes after three letter domain 16 years after it’s registered.
I’ve seen a lot of egregious UDRP cases over the years. This one may take the cake.
Imagine the year is 1995. You register the domain name GEA.com because your personal initials are GEA and you have a business called G.E.A. Design.
Then 14 years later, in 2009, a German company starts complaining that its acronym is GEA and you should sell it the domain name for a nominal amount so it can upgrade its web address from GEAGroup.com. When you refuse, a couple years later — 16 years after you registered the domain name — the company files a UDRP against you.
That’s exactly what happened when GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft filed a case against a California man this year.
The WIPO panelist sums up the bad faith argument fairly nicely:
The Complainant’s suggestion that the Respondent’s failure to display content on the website since 2007 would somehow confuse Internet users is not in the Panel’s view credible. In addition the Panel notes that the Respondent has apparently refused numerous offers for sale of the Disputed Domain Name from various organizations, including from the Complainant, on the legitimate basis that it has used its email address from this website for many years and that to sell it and to have to change email addresses would cause the Respondent considerable disruption and inconvenience. In these circumstances the suggestion by the Complainant of its impression, based on its lawyers’ communications with the Respondent in 2009, that the Respondent would be prepared to sell the Disputed Domain Name for a substantial multiple of the USD 2,000 sum offered by the Complainant, carries little weight.
Overall, the Panel’s view that the Disputed Domain Name has not been registered or used by the Respondent in bad faith is only reinforced by the delay of the Complainant in acting to obtain the Disputed Domain Name. Had the Complainant really been concerned about the Respondent’s illegitimate motives or about damage to its reputation it would not have waited so long after the initial registration in 1995 of the Disputed Domain Name to first communicate with the Respondent (the first communication with the Respondent by the Complainant’s lawyers appears to have occurred in 2009) and a total of 16 years to bring this Complaint.
Needless to say, the panel ruled that the domain owner can keep the domain name. But he should have also found GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.
Boooom says
Boooooooooooooom whoooooo did it!
Michael says
This sentence in the ruling is hilarious:
The Respondent says that contrary to the Complainant’s allegations that his business was in competition with the Complainant’s, the website content that he did have could not have been confused with the Complainant as the first thing that Internet users would have seen was a picture of the Respondent sitting in his living room and some random pictures of a fish.
Andrew Rosener says
If that’s not a clear case of reverse hijacking then what is?
They should be slapped hard!
Gnanes says
Let them buy a .co instead.
John Berryhill says
I would really love to see the pre-dispute correspondence in this case.
The decision refers to the complainant having offered to purchase the domain name. I’d be curious to know of what that communication consisted, and what was the reply.
joke says
reverse domain hijacking should absolutely have been made against complainant
the fact wipo didn’t is a complete mockery
Steve says
Has there ever been a monetary penalty levied against these reverse highjacking parasites, in any case? I don’t think there has ever been a large or small cash penalty to dissuade these morons from trying to steal domain names.
You would think these panelists were working for the complainant in most decisions. Even when they find a clear case of reverse highjacking they still don’t penalize the loser that initiated the case.
My prediction is more and more attempts to steal domains will continue and increase because there is no clear deterrent.
Shame on the panelists!
mike mcnair says
All Germans have a sense of entitlement. But don’t worry, the Russians will take it over again some day, no doubt. Except this time it will be called “flash mobs Russian Style.”
Nic says
Great contribution outing these practices. Thank you.
Dear Google Indexing:
Shame on the unscrupulous, unethical bully, geagroup.com, GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft, led by CEO Jürg Oleas.
Not Offline says
Happy for the domain owner. That complaint is just plain utter crap based on such a selfish mindless motive and they should have been sanctioned for even trying to reverse the situation against the owner. Pft.
John Berryhill says
“there is no clear deterrent.”
Cyberbullies should be forced to read the comments about them on DomainNameWire.
However, it is more often than not the scumbag lawyers who bilk their clients into paying for frivolous crap like this.
The stupid inbred overfed third-generation-wealth types that run these kinds of companies are much too dull to come up with moronic schemes like this. They need unethical lying sacks of filth like the lawyers who suckered the money out of them for filing this POS complaint.