Sony has over 35 retail stores in the United States which sell just Sony Products and they are called Sony Stores.
The official website for the stores is store.sony.com.
So its pretty mind blowing to see that it took Sony over 12 years to file a UDRP on this direct match .com domain of its actual Brick and Mortar stores.
The domain name was registered in 2001 and owned by a company in the Caymans until 2008 when it was purchased by someone in China.
By the end of 2012 the domain was controlled by someone in Panama or using a Panamanian address.
The domain SonyStore.com is currently being forwarded to EZelectronics.com which is also registered to someone in Panama using Internet.BS as the registrar.
The domain EZelectronics.com has an Alexa rank of 2.2 million so it gets some traffic.
Sometimes trademark holder’s worst enemy is themselves and the failure to take action for years which of course only encourages more TM infringing registrations.
Since 2001 Sony has filed well over 70 UDRP involving 100 domain names like sony-singapore.com, sonyhk.com, sonynvm.com, sonykamerasistemi.com, and sony-z5.com, just to name a few of the worthless domains it chased during the years when a bang on product domain remained in the hands of Cybersquatters .
While IP interests battled at ICANN for rights in the new gTLD program for over 6 years, in new extensions that are unlikely to have any significant type in traffic for many years to come, its simply amazing that time after time, trademark holders allow the bang on .com TM infringing domain to continue to bank big dollars for the domain holders while they go after meaningless domains or generic domains they have no rights to.