Man Rolls Dice on Casinos.org: CrapShoot

Man files UDRP for domain name Casinos.org.

To be fair, it was early this morning that I first saw an arbitration filing for the domain name Casinos.org at WIPO.

I rubbed my eyes. This must be a joke, right? Perhaps there was more to the story, I thought. I looked up the history of the domain, and it appears to be owned by the same person for a couple years. Something just didn’t seem right.

I emailed the owner of the domain to ask him what was going on. It’s no joke, he stated. Someone had filed to get the generic domain name Casinos.org from him.

As stated by WIPO’s domain dispute database, the complainant is “Rimbault”. What’s his claim to the domain Casinos.org? Well, he owns a decidedly inferior domain name: C-a-s-i-n-o-s.org.

And here’s one of the big problems with UDRP as it stands today. Even though this claim seems dubious at best, the owner of Casinos.org is going to have to spend a few thousand dollars to defend the domain. Surely, we could at least add a financial penalty if a complainant is found of reverse domain name hijacking?

The owner wrote to me, “It’s going to cost me regarding 2-3k to defend from an idiot who owns c-a-s-i-n-o-s.org, a domain worth less the 1 cent.”

He stated he could probably defend the case himself, but it’s not worth taking any chances.