A rather curious argument in a UDRP for SM.net.
Spanish education publishing company Fundación Santa María-Ediciones SM has lost a UDRP it filed against the owner of SM.net.
Although the company’s trademarks include the term “SM”, it only makes up part of its marks. Thus, the panel ruled that the domain name was not confusingly similar to a mark in which the complainant had rights.
Nothing earth shattering here. But this is what I found amusing.
The Complainant finally claims that the disputed domain name was registered and is used in bad faith. The Respondent uses the disputed domain name and the letters “sm” to run a website proposing pornographic links. According to the Complainant, the letters “sm” would not be descriptive of pornography.
Really? You can’t think of anything that might relate the letters s and m to pornography?
Santa Maria was ill advised. That’s the beauty of the world we live in, there are sharp companies and not so sharp companies, and the not so sharp companies get advice from Attorneys who are sharp to bill and take advantage of the not so sharp companies, and then they get EGG YOLK on the their FACE.
This UDRP thing will make difficult for domainers to buy domains, This UDRP thing must be kept limited tomorrow they will claim UDRP for Yesm.com, Yesam.com, sam.com, Yesmam.com and many more.., after-all pronunciations is some what same as sm.com, and even if person claims than it must be kept limited for particular tld as .com for .com claims, he cannot claim for .net or any other tld, if a person is claiming than whats the point in bringing more tld. or whenever anyone is trademarking company than they must see that all tlds are present, if not than he must buy all the tld from there respective owner or leave it if he cannot buy.
That can also make it difficult for you to pursue a UDRP against someone for possibly similar circumstances, though I suppose that shouldn’t be a problem.
Lawyers tend to shy away from using ridicule to the extent that they no longer have an ear for the blatantly ridiculous.