Company loses two disputes over ETH domains but picks up ETHZ.com.
I’m sure that Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) is a fine institution. Albert Einstein once taught there.
But the technology university apparently doesn’t have much experience with intellectual property.
It just lost a UDRP for ETH.org. And, after filing the UDRP on ETH.org, it filed one for ETH.com. It lost that one, too.
In both cases, the panels found that the domains weren’t registered in bad faith. There are plenty of uses for short domain names, the panels noted.
In ETH.org, the domain name owner rightfully pointed out that he doesn’t speak German, so he was unlikely to be aware of the university’s actual acronym for Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich.
ETH Zurich did win one UDRP, though. It filed a UDRP against ETHZ.com, which is similar to its mains website is ETHZ.cz.
The owner of that domain name didn’t respond to the dispute.
Joseph Peterson says
Domain owners who don’t respond are essentially giving their domains away. Might as well offer to give the domain to anybody who steps in and successfully defends it on their behalf. At least then a few UDRPs that don’t deserve to prevail would be contested.