Tech company fends off Japanese group that filed cybersquatting complaint.
$1.5 billion dollar tech company MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) has successfully defended the domain name Glory.com in a cybersquatting dispute.
MicroStrategy has a vast portfolio of high-quality domain names including alert.com, hope.com, mike.com, speaker.com and voice.com. It’s not clear what it intends to eventually do with many of its domains, but the quality and its unwillingness to sell sometimes attracts challenges.
The company bought Glory.com for $115,000 in 2003.
Glory Ltd. of Himeji, Japan tried to buy the domain name but was rebuffed by MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy offered to sell the domain for more than $10 million in an effort to get Glory Ltd to stop bothering it.
Glory Ltd., which uses the domain Glory.co.jp, filed a UDRP after its efforts failed.
A three-person World Intellectual Property Organization panel determined that Glory Ltd. did not demonstrate that MicroStrategy registered and used the domain in bad faith.
Remarkable that the panel found that Microstrategy did not have a legitimate interest in obtaining a valuable digital asset that the panel itself recognized was appealing “as a single English word with a powerful, positive connotation in English”, even when presented with the fact that Microstrategy paid $115,000 to acquire the domain name.
Some panelists are pushing a “constructive notice” approach to bad faith, whereby a US based company would be held responsible for being aware of an existing US registered trademark. Even without any evidence that the Complainant had been targeted by the domain owner, “constructive notice” would provide a rationale for the panel to find that the domain owner had acquired the domain name in bad faith.
Under “constructive notice”, the panel could have ordered the transfer of glory.com away from Microstrategy, as Glory Ltd had pre-existing US registered trademarks. This would have been a very unjust result and demonstrates how flawed the “constructive notice” approach is.
That the panel refused to grant Microstrategy a legitimate interest in the glory.com domain shows how hostile certain panelists are to recognizing that English word domains with powerful, positive connotations are inherently valuable. That some panelists are actively pushing the “constructive notice” approach shows how vulnerable even large companies would be to panelists pushing self-serving interpretations of the Policy to make it easier for their trademark clients to secure valuable domains through UDRP complaints.
The complaint doesn’t know that Glory is a genuine word.
They wanted all the Glory all did was dig themselfs a bigger hole.
Someone can explain me what are the cases that can be considered bad faith use for a domain name?
Thanks
Whatever the UDRP panelists decide they are, and there are precedents set on a weekly basis.