The domain name owner had a great defense but didn’t reply to the filing.
A World Intellectual Property Organization panelist has ordered the domain name virgin.yachts be transferred to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Enterprises.
I did a doubletake when I saw this decision. In order to register a .yachts domain name, you have to be affiliated with a company in the industry.
Indeed, the domain name virgin.yachts is registered in the name of a company called Virgin Yachts that’s set up in Florida. Just looking at the whois record you can see that the owner of virgin.yachts owns virginyachtsllc.com, which forwards to virgin-yachts.com.
In other words, the respondent has a legitimate interest in the domain name and probably didn’t register it in bad faith.
There may well be a legitimate trademark dispute, but it falls outside the realm of UDRP.
However, the owner didn’t respond to the UDRP. I think it should have been obvious to both the complainant and perhaps the panelist, but without the response, whatever the complainant said was accepted by the panelist. The complainant obviously didn’t point out these facts.
John says
Isn’t the role of a panelist to properly consider whatever truth is immediately visible regardless of lack of response? Isn’t that why unresponded to complaints do not always prevail?
Or put another way, since when is it their role to simply obey the wishes of a complainant regardless of what they see with their own eyes even if there is no response? Did the panelist not see the “Virgin” name of the registrant? These are not court cases where “default judgment” comes into play.
Am I missing anything, or is it just another case of a possible sociopath in a position like that?
Andrew Allemann says
The name of the registrant was taken just from Whois. I could register a domain name and put something like that in the registrant information field. So without a little bit of snooping, the panelist wouldn’t know if it’s legit or not.
John says
Makes sense, but isn’t it their job to do a little snooping in the interest of making a good decision though? Something along the lines of “reasonable effort” or some such notion? In court the judge is not going to make your case if you don’t, and it’s not his job to do that. Isn’t this any different, and shouldn’t it be?
Snoopy says
I do think “bad faith” has been proven at all in this case, it is just boilerplate stuff revolving around the fact that the didn’t respond and that the complainant has a trademark, very poor decision.
Nick says
Most WIPO panelists are corporate shills that are just looking for more business from the complainants.