Arkansas Firm Spills Hot Coffee on Rival’s Domain Name Claims

Respondent in domain dispute successful against rival online coffee retailer.

An Arkansas firm has successfully defended a domain arbitration case brought against it by a rival online coffee retailer.

Discount Coffee.com Inc. filed an arbitration case against WCM Investments of Arkansas, which operates Coffee.org. WCM had registered the domain names discount-coffee.net, discountcoffee.net, and discountedcoffee.com to drive traffic to Coffee.org, and DiscountCoffee.com argued that WCM was trading on its goodwill by using the allegedly confusingly similar domain names. But it was unable to convince the arbitrator that the domains were registered in bad faith and that the respondent didn’t have rights or legitimate interests in them.

There’s an notable lesson here for firms that use a generic domain name: it doesn’t give you rights to all variations of your name. That’s why it’s notable to pick up your name in other top level domain names (and variants in .com) if you want to keep the competition from getting them. If only AOL’s Advertising.com understood that.