Wins Domain Name Arbitration — Arena.com Owner
Panel finds Arena Swimwear’s arguments unconvincing.
Sometimes I see a domain name dispute and wonder what the heck the complainant was thinking. When I saw that the one word generic domain name Arena.com was in dispute, I scratched my head. First of all, I’d never heard of the complainant. Second, you better have some damning evidence against the respondent to go following a generic word such as Arena. When I see the domain name Arena.com, I think of sports arenas.
As it turns out, the complainant didn’t have good evidence of bad faith registration by the respondent. It was just another case of a firm not wanting to pay fair market value for a domain name.
The complainant, Descente, Ltd. and Arena Distribution, S.A., offers a swimwear line called Arena. The respondent, Portsnportals Enterprises Limited, is a member firm of the Hutchison Whampoa group of firms, which operates in a wide variety of commercial areas. The respondent used the Arena.com domain for a document management system earlier this decade but no longer uses the domain name.
For Arena Swimwear to have even a slight chance of winning, I’d expect Arena.com to right now be a parked page with ads for swimwear. But it’s not even in use. The idea that the respondent registered the domain name in bad faith to attract traffic looking for swimwear to its document management web site is laughable. The panel noted:
In this case, there is, in addition, a credibility gap to overcome. Why on earth would an industrial giant of the size of Hutchison Whampoa (or any part of it) wish to select a domain name with the express purpose of ‘selling’ its e-documentation handling services to people looking online for the Complainants’ swimwear? To the Panel, it seems a most unlikely scenario and the Complainants offer no explanation save for the attractive force that their brand engenders.
Apparently Arena approached the respondent regarding buying the domain name. The respondent stated it might let it go for $200,000. Arena balked and filed the UDRP.
The respondent did not ask the panel to find reverse domain name hijacking.
You can read the entire decision here.
