Company’s claimed dates don’t add up.
A World Intellectual Property Organization panel has found Brentwood Holding Group Inc, the operator of NudeLive(dot)com, guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.
The company filed a cybersquatting complaint under UDRP against the domain name NudeLive(dot)net.
Brentwood claimed trademark rights dating to 1998 and submitted the registration date of its domain name as proof. However, the company’s trademark registration states first use in 2015. This is the same year that Michael Berkens sold the domain name for $6,000 at Uniregistry.
This drew the suspicion of the panelist. It seems that the complainant in this case acquired the domain name after the respondent acquired his domain name in 2012, and tried to use the original registration date of the domain as proof of rights dating to 1998.
In fact, the owner of the .net might have a more legitimate beef in this case. It submitted evidence showing a big drop in traffic when the .com came online. There’s a lesson here: if you own the .net domain, someone could get a lot of your traffic by opening a similar site on the .com.
“if you own the .net domain, someone could get a lot of your traffic by opening a similar site on the .com”
I am so glad this only happens with .net and not new gtlds!