KOLS.com was registered three years before Kohls.com.
Retailer Kohls.com has lost a UDRP dispute for the domain name Kols.com, which it claimed was a typo of its domain name Kohls.com.
The respondent, Fox Business Systems / KansasNet, said it registered the domain name as an acronym for “Kansas Online Systems” and had intended to develop it. It hired a number of developers over the years but none of them completed the project. One of those developers parked the domain while working on it, which resulted in a parked page for about a year in the domain’s long history.
But it’s the domain’s history that I think is interesting here. The registrant registered the domain name in 1995. That was three years before Kohls got around to registering Kohls.com. So Kohl’s argument that the respondent registered the domain for typosquatting to take advantage of mistyped traffic to Kohls.com rings hollow. After all, if you wanted to snag Kohl’s traffic wouldn’t you just register Kohls.com instead?
The panelist found that the respondent had rights or legitimate interests in the domain.
Kohls was represented by typosquatting recovery firm CitizenHawk.
Domainer Extraordinaire says
Good for the CitizenHawk scumbags.
Orangelo says
Sounds like Kohls.com is a domain thief.
What a scummy company for trying to steal this domain, IMO.
Even big companies like Kohls.com are as bad as a thug with a gun to your head, based on these actions.
Burn in hell, Kohls !!!
Domainer Extraordinaire says
Kohls had no idea they tried to steal this domain name. They bought the sales pitch from the scumbags at CitizenHawk. I’m sure CitizenHawk went for a lot more Kohls typos they thought they could monetize.
Andrew Allemann says
I talked to the CEO of CitizenHawk a couple weeks ago. He confirmed that their clients approve every UDRP that goes out, CitizenHawk just helps draft it.
Steve says
They should have went for Koles.com which is a parked page with Kohls as the first result. And lo and behold guess who owns that one? Oversee.net – the biggest squatter on the net.
Domainer Extraordinaire says
Ok 2 scummy companies.
thandi says
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Misato says
Another cyber bully heard from. I thought Lego was bad when I found out that they sued over more domaims than Microsoft and Google combined. Kohls can go take a long walk off of a short pier. Kols is completely different than Kohls. Let’s even say it was an intentional typo. So what? Kohls can’t claim copyright on every word that begins a K that and ends in an S. The site did not misrepresented Kohls in any way, or have anything what so ever to do with Kohls.