Lawsuit filed to halt transfer of Lascal.com.
Stanley Pace, who has a history of UDRP cases as well as challenging adverse decisions in court, has filed a lawsuit (pdf) in an effort to overturn a decision against his domain name Lascal.com.
Joran Lundh, who is associated with the stroller and kids safety business Lascal, filed a complaint against Lascal.com with World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in August.
Pace acquired the domain name in 2016 when it expired. He argued that he registered it because Lascal is a surname and a term to described planned roads between Las Vegas and California.
The single-member WIPO panel agreed with Lundh that Pace was cybersquatting with his registration of lascal.com and ordered the domain name to be transferred.
In response, Pace filed a lawsuit arguing this is a case of reverse domain name hijacking. He is asking a court for declaratory relief and attorney’s fees.
Pace recently moved from Texas to Washington and hired Seattle-based lawyer Derek Newman to represent him in the lawsuit. (Steven Rinehart represented Pace in the UDRP.)
Lundh, a Swedish citizen located in Hong Kong, submitted to jurisdiction in Pace’s location when he filed the UDRP.
I see that the Complainant does have trademark from 2004 in the EU, but of course that is Jurisdictional and does not cover USA or Hong Kong. The problem with the UDRP is that they allow a Complaint to be made using Trademarks, BUT then do NOT allow a Respondent to use TradeMark laws to respond .A bit unfair and biased towards Complainants.
Replace “bit” with “Grossly” .
I dunno — smells like teen squatting to me…
A smell test…when abridging due process?
Panelist Lothian is CEO of Demys Limited, which offers “domain name disputes and acquisitions…” “We’re proud to have moved the market” in “domain name services.” Lothian’s trade is the distortion of the Policy towards stripping domain names for his clients–he’s not hiding it. The UDRP is his ad platform, and property belonging to others is what he’s selling. (www.demys.com).
Lothian insinuates that the Respondent is in bad faith because he didn’t detail a relationship to the previous domain owner, Las Cal Nevada. (Las Cal Nevada sold their domain when they folded their Taco Bell franchises in 2015. They could tell us this, were they a party…apparently standing is as inconvenient to Lothian’s ends as targeting.) Is Lothian demanding a bill of sale from the previous owner to the Respondent? Well, that’s what the Respondent provided, and it’s called the WHOIS Creation Date (1997).
Or is Lothian demanding some camaraderie or kin relationship which would sanctify the domain handover. What specific data would the UDRP make a prerequisite of a response? Proof of coffees on the regular? Same tech incubator? Or maybe the auction broker is a family friend? What level of manufactured intimacy between original registrant and aftermarket buyer will operate to preserve millions of dollars in asset value in these ancient registrations? What a disingenuous, infantile line of inquiry, and what a slippery slope Lothian is trying to sell here.
Sedo’s parking ads create a nebulous stink, but trademark infringement is explicitly excluded from the UDRP’s purview. (https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/overview3.0/). Why is that so? Spoiler alert, it’s not just because the UDRP hasn’t any time, budget, or evidentiary tools. It is because there are virtually zero actual trademark infringement LOSSES in such link page disputes. We’re talking about 0.46 cents at stake, via their own affiliate links, readily documented, and we’re talking about ‘likelihood of consumer confusion’ between a Google-style html link and an actual storefront. No, of course complainants are not suing for infringement. What complainants are doing is raising nebulous stinks about theoretical infringement harm, using ‘firms’ like Lothian’s Demys. Because the objective is the wholesale theft of valuable domain names, registered by others 20+ years prior, and prior to their very existence.
Either the rights that flow from the Whois creation date carry to an unrelated aftermarket buyer, as held in AIRFX, or the ACPA becomes a dangerous, lawsuit-fomenting nonsense.
Dangerous, because the ACPA would operate to invite contract killings. A multimillion-dollar asset becomes cost-free, simply because the registrant conveniently dies and his domains go to auction? What’s the going rate for a contract hit—5000 piddly USD? Killing registrants would become standard business practice.
Lawsuit-fomenting, because if we’re stripping an ancient registration, who has first right to it? Is it this Swedish Lascal company? Or is it the Lascal software company in Japan? Or is it one of the 1500+ people in the US named Lascal? Or is it the older baby buggy company ‘La Scala,’ which calls Lascal an infringer?