A dentist, an affair, and reverse domain name hijacking

A dentist tried to use UDRP to take down a gripe site about an alleged affair. It backfired.

When a dentist in Huntington Beach, California, had an affair, a local man decided to air his grievance in a very public way.

Daniel Kim created a gripe site about dentist Dongjin Kim when he learned that his wife was having an affair with him. Don Kim owns a dental practice called Nexen Dental Studio, so Daniel Kim used the domain NexenDentalStudioInsights.com for a gripe site, alleging that Dongjin Kim was ruining his marriage.

The dentist filed a UDRP to try to gain control of the site. But it turns out the parties entered into a stipulation agreement in a civil lawsuit that allowed the website to remain public, so long as no additional information was added.

World Intellectual Property Organization panelist Nick Gardner found that the dentist’s UDRP filing was filed in bad faith and constitutes reverse domain name hijacking. He wrote:

The Policy is designed to address a specific and narrow category of abuse: cybersquatting, which broadly encompasses the bad-faith registration and use of domain names that are identical or confusingly similar to the trademarks of others. In the present case there is no dispute that there is a court-supervised Stipulation Agreement reached between the parties in or about January 2025, which directly addresses the Disputed Domain Name and the website content associated with it.

The Panel does not take any account of the Complainant’s original failure to properly identify the earlier court proceedings in the Complaint and accepts this was inadvertent.

However it should have been obvious to the Complainant that the Panel would not be in a position, within the confines of a UDRP administrative proceeding, to interpret or enforce the terms of a United States court stipulation agreement, to determine whether its terms have been complied with, or to resolve the parties’ competing characterisations of what was agreed and what the court intended. These are quintessentially matters for the court that supervised the agreement, or for another court of competent jurisdiction. A UDRP panel lacks the procedural tools, evidentiary mechanisms and legal authority to make such determinations.

The Panel further observes that in any event the underlying dispute in this case is plainly not one of conventional cybersquatting. The Respondent does not appear to have registered the Disputed Domain Name in order to sell it to the Complainant, to divert the Complainant’s customers for commercial gain, to attract pay-per-click advertising revenue, or to engage in any of the paradigm forms of cybersquatting that the Policy was designed to address. Rather, on the evidence before this Panel, the Disputed Domain Name is being used by a person who has a personal grievance against the Complainant and who has deployed the Disputed Domain Name as a vehicle for what is, in substance, a targeted personal and reputational attack upon the Complainant as an individual. Whether such conduct gives rise to claims under defamation law, harassment, tortious interference or contempt of a court order are questions for the courts of the United States, not for a UDRP administrative panel. In all the circumstances the Panel concludes that it should have been obvious to the Complainant that the PRE-EXISTING dispute between the parties should be dealt with by a court with appropriate jurisdiction.