Panel finds Singapore company brought case in abuse of UDRP.
A World Intellectual Property Organization panel has found Sport and Fashion, Pte. Ltd., a sports equipment/apparel company, guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.
The company filed a cybersquatting complaint against the domain demix.com. It markets a brand called Demix.
Canadian company St. Lawrence Cement Inc owns the domain name. It markets cement products under the Demix brand.
The cement company registered the domain in 1998, well before the Complainant had any trademark rights to the term.
Based on the panel decision, it appears the Complainant might have copied-and-pasted information from another UDRP filing into this one:
The Complaint appears to have been prepared with very little attention to detail and as noted above includes erroneous references to a completely unrelated trademark. Once the intended respondent was identified as being a Canadian company likely to be involved in the cement business (given its name), it ought to have been obvious to the Complainant that the Respondent was likely to have independently coined the Disputed Domain Name. If the Complainant was in any way unclear on this issue, a few minutes Internet searching would have found the Respondent’s present web sites at for example “www.demixbeton.ca”. Similarly a search of the Canadian Trademarks Registry would have found a number of DEMIX-related trademarks predating the Complainant’s trademark – whilst these are in various corporate names this should nevertheless have alerted the Complainant to the potential difficulties with its case.
Russian Troll says
That’s an interesting trend (first Carcam, now this), probably some Russian business magazine had posted an [incompetent] article about UDRPs not long ago and people started filing them.