Bad decision in a three-letter .com UDRP.
I just wrote about PCO.com being saved in a UDRP despite the domain name owner not responding. This was before I saw a similar case in which a three-letter domain name was lost in a UDRP.
National Arbitration Forum panelist Neil Anthony Brown QC has ordered the domain name IMI.com transferred to Irving Materials, Inc.
Brown generally provides a nuanced and well-reasoned opinion in UDRPs, and I’m surprised by the result here.
To be fair, the domain owner didn’t respond. Still, a quick look at the facts of the case strongly suggest this was not cybersquatting and the domain was not registered in bad faith.
It appears the current owner is the original registrant from 1994. Its business was originally called Internet Marketing, Inc., hence the domain name choice IMI.com. It subsequently moved its business to PartnerVision.org.
IMI.com resolves to a page headlined “Internet Marketing Inc a PartnerVision venture”. It says the company has changed domain names and then says “Searching for other IMI Companies, try these:” followed by a list of other companies that use the IMI acronym. These links are clearly not paid links, despite the complainant arguing that they are pay-per-click links leading to companies that compete with the complainant.
The complainant latches on to a page on the site that says the domain names are for sale. It states: Click here to continue reading…
Donuts, Amazon, and Google have the dubious honor of having the most objected-to applications for new top level domains.