Claiming trademark to the term “women”, firm files UDRP against women-asia.com

Sorry guys, you don’t own “women”.

An international modeling agency claiming to have trademarks for the term “women” used them to try to wrestle away the domain name women-asia.com in a UDRP.

It lost.

PEC Intellectual Property Management B.V. of Amsterdam, which is affiliated with modeling agency Women Management, filed the complaint against a domain owner from Thailand. The complainant actually has some stylized trademarks for the term “women” in various jurisdictions. Although some panels have accepted stylized trademarks as being confusingly similar to a domain name, it would be quite a stretch this case.

The panel noted that the word “women” is an “extremely common generic word”, and thus women-asia.com is not confusingly similar to a mark in which PEC has rights. It also determined that the domain name wasn’t registered and used in bad faith.

The domain owner didn’t respond, but this was still a relatively straightforward case.