To reverse hijack his way into .com — Entrepreneur tries

Complainant tried to upgrade from .co to .com through UDRP.

A World Intellectual Property Organization panel has found that a Colombian entrepreneur tried to reverse domain name hijack the domain watertimer.com.

Felipe Ospina filed a UDRP against the domain registrant, who purchased the domain name in 2023 for $4,120.

Ospina has since launched a business and filed trademark applications for the term “Water Timer”. He uses the domain watertime.co, and owns other domains counting watertimer.app and watertimer.io.

He attempted to purchase the matching .com domain at issue and filed the UDRP following his buyout attempt was unsuccessful.

Panelist Edoardo Fano found that the domain wasn’t registered and used in bad faith. Fano noted that the Respondent purchased the domain ahead of Ospina filed any trademark applications and that there was no evidence of targeting.

In finding reverse domain name hijacking, Fano wrote:

The Panel finds that the Complainant has contravened the above RDNH bases, since he knew or ought to have known that there was no evidence of the Respondent’s bad faith directed towards the Complainant, making highly unlikely if not impossible that the Respondent had been targeting the Complainant. Finally, as it has been stated in previous decisions, a complainant is at risk of a RDNH declaration when its attempt to try and buy a domain name is not successful, and it tries to obtain it by using, or rather “abusing”, the UDRP.

Both parties represented themselves.