Panelist points out many flaws in the Complainant’s case.
A World Intellectual Property Organization panelist has found (pdf) Euronet Worldwide, Inc. guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.
The payments company filed a UDRP against Euronet.com, which is currently owned by Euronet Internet.
Euronet Internet appears to have gone through many acquisitions over the years, but ultimately, it has a history of providing telecom and hosting services dating back to the 1990s.
The two parties disagreed about the current registrant’s ties to all of the former entities, but it wasn’t the most important thing to argue about; it’s clear that the registrant did not register the domain in bad faith.
Panelist Adam Taylor determined that this was a case of reverse domain name hijacking for many reasons:
- The Complainant first tried to acquire the domain without making any assertions of intellectual property rights (making this a Plan B reverse domain name hijacking case).
- The Complainant was likely aware of the connection between the original and later registrant of the domain name through acquisitions.
- The case failed by a large margin because of “the longstanding use of the disputed domain name in a different industry, the lack of any reputation evidence from the Complainant, the lack of any evidence of targeting and the fact that the disputed domain name reflected a relatively combination of dictionary terms in use by many other business”.
- The “Complaint “lacks candor” in many ways:
- The Complainant misleadingly describes itself as “a worldwide provider of global telecommunication and payment services”, whereas in reality it appears to be focused on payment services.
- The Complaint misleadingly states that the Respondent “reached out” to the Complainant to sell the disputed domain name to the Complainant, whereas the reverse appears to be the case.
- The Complainant, which has plainly reviewed the archive history of the website of the disputed domain name, failed to produce any evidence of the former extensive active use of the disputed domain name in connection with hosting/telecommunication services; the Complainant has simply selected a single screenshot showing the later corporate information use of the disputed domain name in 2021, and indeed has omitted the archive screenshots indicating that this usage dated back to at least 2014.
Eversheds Sutherland represented the Complainant, and IP Twins represented the domain name owner.
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