Sorry guys, you don’t own “women”.
An international modeling agency claiming to have trademarks for the term “women” used them to try to wrestle away the domain name women-asia.com in a UDRP.
PEC Intellectual Property Management B.V. of Amsterdam, which is affiliated with modeling agency Women Management, filed the complaint against a domain owner from Thailand. The complainant actually has some stylized trademarks for the term “women” in various jurisdictions. Although some panels have accepted stylized trademarks as being confusingly similar to a domain name, it would be quite a stretch this case.
The panel noted that the word “women” is an “extremely common generic word”, and thus women-asia.com is not confusingly similar to a mark in which PEC has rights. It also determined that the domain name wasn’t registered and used in bad faith.
The domain owner didn’t respond, but this was still a relatively straightforward case.
Mickey says
UDRP needs to be changed and let complainants pay, if they are not right. Michael Cyger from DomainSherpa should interview ICANN executives and ask them if they think it is okay to let registrants to pay legal fees and to have a lot of hassles with these kind of jerk complainants?