Spanish spa and wellness center brought UDRP in bad faith.
Nat Cohen’s Telepathy has successfully defended the domain name Sha.com from an attack by Albir Hills Resort, S.A., known as SHA Wellness Clinic.
The panel also determined that SHA Wellness Clinic was guilty of attempting reverse domain name hijacking.
I’ve got to say, this was a no brainer for the three person panel.
First, SHA’s attorney said the resort had been “operating in the market for 15 years”. But the evidence showed otherwise, at least for the SHA Wellness Clinic. In fact:
The Complainant states that, after the creation of the SHA Wellness Clinic, the Complainant noticed that the disputed domain name sha.com was already registered; the Complainant thus attempted to purchase it from the Respondent, but, since the Respondent had requested an “exaggerated offer”, the Complainant opted for filing this Complaint.
That’s a good way of admitting that the domain was registered before you were in business.
SHA’s lawyer even said that the company tried to negotiate for the domain name, but since the price of the domain was high it opted to file the dispute.
I also appreciate this line from SHA’s attorney:
“the fact that the [Respondent’s] use is not real produces an obstruction act for my client, because the obvious and logical owner of the domain name is the owner of SHA. That, and furthermore the fact that there are no trademarks “SHA” owned by the respondent, implies a decrease of the reputation of my client’s trademarks”.
The “obvious and logical owner”??
If you’re wondering why Telepathy gets hit with so many UDRPs for three letter .com domains, it’s because it owns more than 1,000 of them.
Hopefully attorneys for other companies thinking about stealing three letter .com domains from Telepathy will do some research and figure out they’re wasting their money.
Who cares, no penalty, this guy will be paying legal fees till he is blue in the face, with no recourse, broken system…
I have to agree with Ron here. UDRP is cheap and I doubt this is the last that Telepathy sees.
it is ICANN fault if they have a rule to stop filing UDRP if the domain was registered before the trademark this kind of abuse will not happened.
Wrong!!!
The first solution is to not allow generics to be trademarked.
The second solution is to not allow a UDRP filled on a generic as TM on generics do not mean you have rights to them!
The third is to put pressure on ICANN and make sure that generics are not allowed to be enterd into the Trademark Clearing House in the new gTLD program.
If that will be allowed you will see way more companies using the fact that they got the generic domain into the TMCH to go after .com generics!