Owner of Kimya.fr tries to reverse hijack Kimya.com

3D materials company tries to upgrade from .fr to .com by filing a cybersquatting dispute.

Armor, which operates a company called Kimya using the domain name Kimya.fr, has been found to have tried to reverse domain name hijack Kimya.com.

According to a UDRP decision at World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Armor’s earliest trademark for Kimya dates to 2018. The Kimya.com domain owner, Ozguc Bayraktar, registered the domain in 1999.

Bayraktar registers generic Turkish word domain names as an investment. Kimya translates as “chemistry” in English.

WIPO panelist Kaya Köklü found reverse domain name hijacking for two reasons.

First, the domain registrations predates Armor’s trademarks by nearly two decades.

Second, a domain appraisal that Armor attached to its complaint notes that Kimya is a dictionary term in Turkish, so it was made aware of this before filing its complaint.