UDRP lawyer, Thursday edition — Fire your

I could have saved this complainant some money.

Here’s an easy way to waste a few thousand bucks: file a UDRP against infringement on a subdomain.

This is easily one of the weirdest claims I’ve seen in a while and it involved the domain names windoows.net and windooows.com. The domains are clearly typos of the term “windows”, although they are used as lead gen sites for house windows, not Microsoft Windows. And it wasn’t Microsoft that filed the complaint; it was Comfort Window Co., Inc.

It gets weirder. Comfort Window argued that the domain owner had set up web sites as comfort.windoows.net and comfort.windooows.com, and this amounted to cybersquatting. In fact, it argued it was typosquatting. I’ve seen typosquatting claims based on domains people didn’t own, but this takes it to a whole fresh level.

(For its part, the respondent denied that these subdomains existed.)

Here’s how panelist Linda simply explained the problem to Comfort Windows:

The “domain names” comfort.windoows.net and comfort.windooows.com are not domain names, but subdomain names. A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. For example, johndoe.example.com and janedoe.example.com are subdomains of the domain. The UDRP rules do not apply to subdomain names. In order for the UDRP Policy to apply, there must be evidence that these subdomains are registered with a registrar.