Company effectively admits its original complaint was destined to fail when it makes supplemental filing.
Inbay Limited of the United Kingdom has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking in a UDRP for Inbay.com.
The three person panel found that Inbay should have known its complaint would fail from the outset. Perhaps more importantly, it should have known it would fail after receiving the domain owner’s response — yet it decided to file a supplemental filing anyway.
That supplemental filing gave me a chuckle.
Inbay.com was registered in 1998 and Inbay Limited thought the current registrant was the original one. If this were the case then Inbay.com was registered well before Inbay became a company.
Yet in the response, the registrant noted that it didn’t actually get the name until 2007. This opened up the door for Inbay Limited to argue that it was related to some predecessor companies that were formed before the current registrant picked up Inbay.com.
So the company filed a supplemental filing discussing these predecessor companies.
In order to make a supplemental filing you are supposed to show that new information has come to light that you couldn’t possibly have known when making the original filing. Here’s how Inbay Limited justified the new filing:
The stated basis for the introduction and requested admission of the Supplemental Filing was that, as the Respondent had disclosed that its date of registration of the Domain Name was in 2007, not 1998 (as alleged in the Complaint), evidence of the common law rights in INBAY held by the Complainant’s predecessors and allegedly transferred to the Complainant was relevant.
In other words, Inbay knew its original filing was destined to fail, but now it felt like it had something to go on.
Sigh.
Add Inbay Limited to the reverse domain name hijacking list, and another win to domain attorney Zac Muscovitch’s tally.
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