Another reverse domain name hijacking case — Another hour
Inspectorate America Corporation guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.
Tired of reading stories regarding reverse domain name hijacking? Well, I’m tired of writing them. Yet, here’s another.
Inspectorate America Corporation has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name loams.com. The firm has a software program called LOAMS, which stands for Lube Oil Analysis Management System.
The domain owner, Netcorp, stated it registered the domain name since it’s a typo of “loans”. Netcorp owns a number of other typos of dictionary words.
(Side note: when you search google for Inspectorate America Corporation loams it states “Showing results for Inspectorate America Corporation loans“.)
The complainant reached out to the domain owner ahead of filing its UDRP. Domain attorney John Berryhill responded with a very persuasive argument that the complainant was wrong and ought to drop the issue. It decided to file a UDRP anyway.
Berryhill represented Netcorp in the response. He didn’t ask for a reverse domain name hijacking finding, but the World Intellectual Property Organization panel unanimously agreed that it was warranted:
This Complaint was doomed ahead of it was filed. Complainant, who was represented by counsel, ought to have known this. The Domain Name was registered back in 2003, and the content of the website to which it resolved bore no relationship to Complainant’s goods and services, or those of a competitor of Complainant, or to anything even remotely close to such goods and services.
More importantly, in pre-dispute correspondence, Respondent plausibly denied having had any knowledge or awareness of Complainant’s mark, spelled out its motivation for registering the Domain Name, confirmed that it had been using the Domain Name for years in pursuit of its legitimate business purpose, and supplied authority to Complainant and its counsel for the proposition that Respondent’s activities were not in bad faith. Nonetheless, Complainant could not take “No” for an answer, and chose to launch its foredoomed Complaint.
