Panel says that tire company submitted “clearly fabricated” evidence.
Indian tire company CEAT (short for Cavi Elettrici e Affini Torino) has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name CEATE.com.
The company owns the domain CEAT.com, which it won in a 2011 UDRP filing. There was one dissenting panelist in that case, Neil Anthony Brown. Brown was one of the panelists in the case for CEATE.com as well.
According to the World Intellectual Property Organization decision, CEAT manufactured evidence suggesting that the parked domain at CEATE.com showed ads for tires. It did this by entering “ceat tyre company” in the search box on the parked domain.
The three-person panel found that “Complainant’s screenshots showing use the disputed domain name in connection with the Complainant’s trademark submitted as Annex 2 to the Complaint have been clearly fabricated in an attempt to create evidence of the Respondent’s bad faith.”
It found that CEAT engaged in reverse domain name hijacking.
CEAT was represented by DePenning & DePenning, which has represented a client in a reverse domain name hijacking case before. The domain owner was represented by Zak Muscovitch.
If ever someone notices a UDRP complaint that is filed by a UK based Complainant and/or Represented UK Based lawyer AND such a complaint has included clearly and provably false/fabricated evidence then I would be interested to know. It would be interesting to pursue a case of “Attempting to pervert the course of Justice” which is a criminal offence that applies to any such matters, including civil matters.
Where is the financial penalty for these Indian hijackers… This is outright criminal.
I wonder how many times such lies have been accepted by the panel as truth. In such cases I wonder how many times the complainant has won.
Watch out for fabricated evidence in UDRP and court complaints over domain names using search bars on websites.
Search engines results can be gamed by doing a number of predatory searches to make them say “did you mean …” after searching for a misspelled non-existent product or service.
Canadian lawyers are among the worst offenders.
The Canadian lawyers representing Michaels Stores fabricated evidence in the Canadian Federal Court case against me in their 2015 and 2016 over michaels .ca.
They even got a former RCMP officer to swear an affidavit containing screenshots that he took credit for producting. On cross-examination, the lawyers admitted to manufacturing the evidence themselves. Google Analytics proved that there was no traffic on many of the website pages in his affidavit on the date he allegedly visited and took them.
And Facebook analytics showed that there was no traffic on the Facebook page on the date of the alleged screenshots.
Question everything.