Baby Product Firm “Gambles”, Gets 4 Character Domain Canceled

Firm gets BiBi.com domain name ‘canceled’.

[Update: The domain name wasn’t actually ordered transferred to Bibi, instead it was ordered “canceled”, so no one really won the case. ]Lamprecht AG, which sells a line of baby products under the BiBi name, has won the domain name BiBi.com from Future Media Architects through Uniform domain-name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) gotten the ‘cancelation’ of an FMA domain name through UDRP. The complainant had lost a case for the domain BiBiBaby.com just a month earlier.

Future Media Architects (FMA) owns over a hundred thousand domain names, but never sells the domain names. It has been subject to a number of UDRP cases but has a winning record. It has successfully defended Jackass.com, EFX.com, and YIT.com.

Don’t think that this case is over yet — FMA has sued in the past when a panel returned an adverse decision, counting for LH.com.

In this case, FMA argued that the complainant filed the case with the “true intent was to gamble the relatively minimal filing fee in the hope that the Panel would order a transfer of the Domain Name.”

That gamble paid off, assuming there’s no lawsuit.

FMA stated it bought the domain name for a number of reasons, one of which was that it’s a four character domain name. But the panelist wrote that a domain registrant still has to do a trademark search on four character domain names, even if they are registering it for the generic attraction:

…The Respondent simply asserted that it registered the Domain Name since of its attractiveness as a four-letter expression.

That is a completely inadequate justification for registering a non-dictionary word without undertaking at least some bona fide enquiry to determine whether a third party trademark might be identical to the domain name. In the Panel’s view, there is no principle that very short alphanumeric strings are per se “fair game” for domain name registrations, without regard to the good faith of the registrant when registering and using the domain name…

…Thirdly, the Domain Name is not one in respect of which it might have been reasonably considered improbable that some third party might hold an identical trademark. The Domain Name consists of two easy-to-say, repeated, syllables, which phonetically might stand for the letters “BB”. In the Panel’s view, the chances of an identical third party trademark being out there somewhere ought to reasonably have been regarded as quite high, and ought to certainly not have been disregarded.