Receiver wants ICANN to reverse domain transfers.
Remember that court case where the receiver, in charge of a number of domain names, said ICANN had the power to stay a UDRP decision?
It’s getting a little wonkier.
Now the receiver is asking ICANN to “undo” a handful of transfers that were completed under UDRP.
Those transfers include typo domain names now controlled by companies such as Apple and Public Storage.
The receiver asked the court to force ICANN to transfer back 22 domain names lost by the lawsuit defendant in UDRP cases.
But only five of the domain names were ever transferred to the complainant in the UDRP cases. For some reason the primary domain registrar, Fabulous, didn’t transfer most of the domain names.
So the receiver is asking for a bunch of domains to be “transferred back” that were never transferred away.
It gets better. Two of the domain names lost in UDRP have expired and are no longer registered. So the receiver could just go register them at any domain registrar if he wanted.
When it comes to the five domains that were transferred after being lost in UDRP, they are pretty clear typos of brand such as Apple and Public Storage. The receiver is basically asking a court to take the domain name Aplle.com away from Apple.
Obviously ICANN has no power to undo a UDRP or otherwise transfer a domain name.
But its reply to the court has not satisfied the receiver. The receiver instead focuses on how ICANN is threatening Fabulous for not transferring many of the domains as ordered under UDRP.
The receiver questions how ICANN can argue it can’t stay a UDRP proceeding but take action against Fabulous for not complying with a UDRP decision.
The receiver indicates that Fabulous shouldn’t have transferred the domains because of a stay in this lawsuit, but some of these transfers were ordered a long time ago.
I also find this line in the receiver’s filing rather perplexing:
In its response, ICANN confirmed that 4 of the 22 domain names (aplle.com, publicstorge.com, pulicstorage.com, and puplicstorage.com) are both profitable and have actually been transferred as a result of the illegal default decisions issued by WIPO
Really? ICANN confirmed the domains were profitable when parked?
DotCom says
A domain receivers job is to basically “park” domains to recover “damages” from typo cases. So if you registered a typo, a lawyer could steal your entire portfolio by saying that typo was worth $100K in damages and there is no way to evaluate the value of a domain portfolio so, yeah it is a legal way of bankrupting an innocent for corporate gain.
Very, very scummy way of operation that fortune 500 companies give their powerful legal arms to recover operating fees. Because lawyers don’t actually generate their own income, they have to steal it someway or another.
This is how America is ran, and lawyers are destroying the fabric of the internet, the justice system, and politics.
rs says
“Obviously ICANN has no power to undo a UDRP or otherwise transfer a domain name.”
This is not obvious to me.
Dave says
Unless those lawyers are voted lawmakers themselves, who exactly is retaining them to do all that anyway?
Somebody ought to teach that receiver a thing or two about contracts. Not that that receiver has to maybe understand or accept that, though.