Company that trademarks old names filed cybersquatting complaint against ChipWich.com.
The history of ChipWich is quite interesting, too. It was the name of an ice cream sandwich using two chocolate chip cookies back in the early 1980s. The company struggled, and Nestle bought the brand in 2007.
Nestle abandoned its U.S. trademark for ChipWich after that. That’s where the complainant comes in.
Jeff Kaplan runs a company called Retrobrands, which trademarks old brands that have abandoned their U.S. trademarks. Retrobrands got a stylized trademark for ChipWich back in 2011, then waited until 2016 to go after the ChipWich.com domain name.
There were two problems with Kaplan’s case.
First, Nestle still has rights or legitimate interests in the domain name. It still has non-U.S. trademarks for ChipWich.
Second, although the panel didn’t consider this issue, Nestle obviously didn’t register the domain name in bad faith.
I was gonna say, this is obviously reverse domain name hijacking as Retrobrands registered their trademark (Nov 2011) after the domain was registered (May 1999). This trademark just happened to be a duplicate of an older trademark, but are different…
Jeff Kaplan seems like a complete douche to trademark brands that someone else created. They should be open to the public.
“[Nestle] still has non-U.S. trademarks for ChipWich.”
Don’t you know that non-US trademarks don’t matter? Nothing outside the US matters to anyone in the US!