comScore gets Reverse Domain Name Hijacking win

Canadian firm tries to take away comScore’s Marketscore.com domain, but fails miserably.

It’s not often that you find a large company like analytics service comScore on the receiving end of a UDRP. But the company was recently forced to defend its domain name MarketScore.com, which it used for a service between 2001-2007.

The complainant, MarketScore Inc., is a Canadian company that appears to have started its business in 2013. comScore, Inc. registered MarketScore.com in 1999.

This was a dead-on-arrival UDRP, and the panelist admonished the complainant for filing the case. comScore didn’t ask for a finding of reverse domain name hijacking, but National Arbitration Forum panelist Dennis A. Foster found it necessary:

Respondent has not requested a finding of reverse domain name hijacking in this case, but the Panel is compelled to issue such a finding based upon the extremely poor presentation found in the Complaint. The Panel believes that Complainant should have known, based upon prior UDRP rulings, that it had absolutely no chance to prevail as to Policy ¶¶ 4(a)(ii) and (iii). Clearly, Respondent, who owned a USPTO registration for the MARKETSCORE mark* during a period of disputed domain name ownership, could easily be commonly known as the disputed domain name, , even if known by other names. Clearly, Respondent was doing business ‒ i.e., engaged in a bona fide offering of services ‒ under that mark, whether or not that business was conducted on the most satisfactory basis. Clearly, if Complainant did not enter into business until 2013, no UDRP panel would find that a disputed domain name registered in 1999 was registered in bad faith with respect to Complainant.

*The panelist’s emphasis was an underline rather than bold.