Is Confusingly Similar to “We Buy Any Car” — Apparently WeWannaBuyYourCar.com

I need a crash course in confusing similarity.

I don’t know, folks. Maybe it’s time for me to pack it up and go home.

Why the frustration?

Following reading hundreds of UDRP cases apparently I still can’t figure out what “confusingly similar” is.

Today’s case in point? WIPO panelist David Perkins has awarded the domain name WeWannaBuyYourCar.com to a firm with trademarked logos for “We Buy Any Car.com”.

OK, so ‘we’, ‘buy’, and ‘car’ are similar. But I think ‘wanna’ and ‘your’ kind of throw this off. What if the domain in dispute was “webuycars.com”? Would that be confusingly similar?

Perkins agreed with the complainant’s assertion that the “…phonetic pronunciation of their marks and the disputed domain name is similar due to the beginning and ending of the WEBUYANYCAR trademarks and the disputed domain name being identical, namely “we” and “car”, and that is where the marks have the most impact on the consumer.”

Now there is certainly some similarity in the logos used by both the complainant and respondent. And apparently WeBuyAnyCar.com is extensively advertised in the UK where both parties are.

But this doesn’t seem like something UDRP was created to address. It may be a trademark dispute, but it’s certainly not a cybersquatting dispute.