Some interesting complainants ranging from Paris Hilton, to Marvel Comics, Standard & Poor’s, Affliction Clothing & to Virgin and Remy Martin in the news, as they either filed or won UDRP’s on domain names today.
Paris Hilton filed a UDRP on the domain name ParisHiltonPornVideos.com, a domain that was registered since 2005
Marvel Characters, Inc filed a UDRP on the domains:
avengers.com.au
captainamerica.com.au
Standard and Poors won a UDRP on the domain name StandardandPoorsSucks.com which should be published shortly.
King.com makers of the Candy Crush game filed a UDRP on:
ccrushsagaguru.com
crush-the-candy.com
crushthecandy.com
crushthecandy.net
crushthecandy.org
farmheroessecrets.com
petrescuesecrets.com
Cognac maker Remy Martin filed a UDRP on the domain name casinolouisxiii.com.
Affliction Holdings, LLC makers of Affliction Clothing filed a UDRP on AfflictionClothinguk.org.
The owners of the dating website Ashley Madison filed a UDRP on the typo Ashleymedison.com.
Virgin filed a UDRP on Virginsaudiarabia.com
Well I can tell you 1 that won’t get an easy ride .
Finally some reasonable UDRPs, as opposed to the Ovation.com shocker.
Again, the can of worms was opened when technology made it possible to shorten URL entries to access the internet.
A domain name contains the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol, plus the WWW (world wide web), at least two dots, the alphabets and/or numbers plus the TLD such as .COM. That is what a Registrant bought. It should not be the same thing as names or numbers outside the internet sphere.
For example, American Broadcasting Company Corporation may have copyright for their name, and even Marca Registrada for ABC, that it obtained in the 20th century, but that should have nothing to do with http://www.Abc.com/
Nothing at all!
It is bizarre to watch this trend develop in the late 90’s. Initially, giant corporations regarded the internet as a fad, and failed to register names that resemble theirs such as the example above; so they later decided to do the next short cut after losing, and that is to find ways to manipulate the powers that be to use trade nark laws to covet these properties. It’s strange that they only claim the .COMs. Apparently the .De, or .Info etc is not infringement. Hmmm..