Egton Medical loses big time, but panel doesn’t admonish it for frivolous filing.
Egton Medical Information Systems Limited has lost a UDRP it filed against Health Axis Group LLC in March over the domain name Patient.com.
This was a particularly egregious filing and obvious abuse of the policy. The three person panel found that Egton Medical didn’t prove any of the three prongs of the UDRP.
Egton also made ridiculous arguments, such as Health Axis Group’s ownership of patient.me being evidence that it’s cybersquatting.
Egton operates at Patient.co.uk. Here’s an example of one of the overtures Egton made in an effort to buy the domain name:
[…] we get many visits from overseas to the medical information at ‘www.patient.co.uk’. As such we are looking to move to a “.com” domain to position us more appropriately to an international audience. I noticed your domain name
had been advertised for sale in the past. Please can you advise as to how much you would want to sell the domain name to me? Kind regards. Ben [F]. Operations Director, Patient.co.uk EMIS.
After inquiring about buying the domain name multiple times, Health Axis Group finally responded with asking prices between $500k and $2.0 million, which are perfectly reasonable asking prices for this domain name.
Yet the panelists never mention reverse domain name hijacking. It’s possible, or even likely, that the respondent didn’t ask for it. But it’s the panel’s obligation to consider reverse domain name hijacking when it believes a case has been filed in abuse of the policy. Given that Egton satisfied none of the requirements of UDRP — not even the trademark requirement — the panel certainly should have considered it.
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