Show gets domain name after announcing new season on Lifetime.
The producer of Supernanny, a reality TV show featuring nanny Jo Frost, has won the rights to the domain name SuperNanny.com through a cybersquatting dispute.
The show debuted in 2004, so you might be surprised that the group waited until 2019 to file a UDRP cybersquatting case against the domain name. It turns out that at the end of March this year they announced a new season coming to the Lifetime network in 2020. They filed the cybersquatting dispute two weeks later.
Supernanny.com was originally registered in January 2000, well before the show debuted in Britain. Normally a domain name must be registered after trademark rights are established in order to win a UDRP. However, the show used historical Whois records to show that the domain name has changed hands multiple times since it was originally registered.
The owner of the domain name didn’t respond to the dispute, so the panelist gave the benefit of the doubt to the Complainant.
JZ says
looks like they previously owned the domain as well.
C.S. Watch says
Well, isn’t that a tough break for these 39 other registered ‘Super Nanny” trademarks, some of which began business in the mid-90s.
[https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/bookmark?s=omgv4ul7pq2v6vq3ppr31njgd0.] I guess they weren’t aware that overt theft was a branding option.
What we know is that if this domain were at a US registrar, this respondent could take this to a US district court, get his or her name back, and pocket a six-figure court award for this Complainant’s illegal seizure. SUPERNANNY.COM is registered in Panama, but Panelist Fink doesn’t warn nor distinguish from a US registrar. A complainant risks a 100K+ beat down by filing a dispute like this? That’s worth a passing mention.
However, this is a panelist whom we already know has no problem robbing individuals of their assets in order to keep using the UDRP as his personal marketing tool and retiree elephant howdah.
“The arbitrator with the highest spike in UDRP disputes is Karl V. Fink, who went from an approximate average of 50 cases per year in the Original Study’s period to nearly 132 cases per year in the Current Study’s study period. This equates to an approximate 11 UDRP disputes per month.”
[https://dnattorney.com/resources/case-studies/]