Lens.com not seeing so clearly.
Online contact lens retailer Lens.com has failed to win a cybersquatting claim (pdf) against the domain name Lens.in.
Lens.com filed the dispute under the .IN Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (INDRP).
The panelist determined that Lens.com doesn’t have any rights in the term “lens”, just lens.com. That would not give it rights to Lens.in, and this caused the rest of the case to fail.
INDRP is very similar to UDRP, except that the third element of use in bad faith says “registration OR use” instead of “registration AND use”. The policy actually contradicts itself on this issue, using OR instead of AND in one spot.
Despite the similarity, INDRP has proven to be extremely complainant-friendly. It has been used to turn over the domains Web.in, Jobs.in, Honey.in and All.in.
There’s a bit of a wrinkle in the Lens.in case. There’s some question over the ownership of the domain name, and the panelist determined that the registry can cancel the Lens.in domain name registration.
If anyone is familiar with dropping .in domain names, they might want to keep an eye out for this.
We owned Lens.co and these guys contacted us with their same BS.
By then I had already sold the name.
They have since acquired it from that party.
Andrew,
The move by the registry has left a lot of us domain investors wondering. The third party who came in the picture – not part of any process – and not sure what that was all about has NOT been disclosed.
This take over (or take back) of single keyword domains is not new if you look at 2005-2006 history (I think you make a mention of few cases they are fraught with fraud and corruption).
Also the domain name will not drop – will be retained by the registry, no point looking out for it.
Thanks
Raj
It is very strange. What was happening with the third party was not clear at all.
ISP.in was retained by registry last time 🙂