Complainant previously owned the domain name, and tried to buy it back from a domain investor before filing a UDRP.
Mangels Industrial S.A., a manufacturing company in Brazil, has been found to have tried to reverse hijack the domain name mangels.com.
The company owned the domain at one point, but it let it expire (or perhaps even asked the domain to be canceled, according to the registrar).
A domain investor acquired the domain at auction in 2019.
The Complainant made offers to buy the domain for about $950 last year, and the domain investor was asking over $60,000.
A three-person World Intellectual Property Organization panel was not persuaded that the domain investor was targeting the Complainant, especially because other companies use the name Mangels and because Mangels is a surname.
In finding reverse domain name hijacking, the panel wrote:
In this case, it is apparent that the Complainant failed to renew its own registration of the disputed domain name (and may even have requested that its registration be canceled), before seeking to have it reinstated after the Respondent had registered it. The Complainant appears to have made initial offers in the region of USD 950 to purchase the disputed domain name from the Respondent, but upon being informed of the Respondent’s asking price, it appears that the Complainant elected instead to commence this proceeding, asserting that the Respondent had registered and used the disputed domain name in bad faith.
In the view of the Panel, for the reasons set out in section C above, the Complaint discloses no reasonable grounds to allege that the Respondent registered and had used the disputed domain name in bad faith. Instead, it appears to the Panel that, having failed to re-register the disputed domain name, and having had its offers to repurchase it for sums in the region of USD 950 rejected, the Complainant elected to bring the proceeding in an attempt to obtain the disputed domain name.
Crepaldi Advogados Associados represented the Complainant, and the Respondent was self-represented.
Is there any difference between a domain ‘investor’ and a squatter? I’m struggling to see what value the ‘investor’ is bringing to the table here to justify asking for $60k. The company should have renewed their domain, of course, but for a third party to come along and squat on the domain doesn’t seem productive. Usually a middle man is providing some value, but here there is none as far as I can see. Is domain investing in essence just pure opportunism?
Hi Jim,
The value an investor brings to the global domain name aftermarket is making the domain name available for sale when it otherwise would not be available for sale.
Had Mangels.com been registered by another party with a company also called Mangels or a family name of Mangels or a farm dedicated to supplying mangels to the world, the domain name would not be available at all to this company unless they likely paid this other party several hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars as such a sale would negatively impact that party’s business using Mangels.com and their business would have settle on and move to a less attractive domain name going forward.
Instead of having to pay this other party 6 or even 7 figures to switch away from the domain name, the investor had the domain name available for only 5 figures with no operating business from which to extract the domain name from with all of the associated consequences and costs incurred by the other party.
Also, as most investors know, the companies seeking to acquire one word .com domain names like this one with multiple commercial meanings are more often than not multi-billion dollar conglomerates or VC-funded startups valued at $500 million or even more. Nobody is crying for them when they have to pay $60,000 for a one-word .com domain name that is not even a rounding error on their net income or owner equity. Most of these well-heeled companies would pay even more than $60,000 to add such a strategic digital asset to their businesses if the price were even higher. Many of these companies simply pay the $60,000 asking price without question or negotiation — proof that they value the domain name much higher than the $60,000.
Thank you for responding. I also suspect that lapsed domain names registered by individuals or smaller business with a legitimate use case would be subject to legal threats, and the new owners would likely feel compelled to give up the domain (perhaps for nothing) instead of hiring lawyers to fight it like this investor has. A multi-thousand dollar fee charged by an investor is merited for companies that would try such tactics.