Nailed for reverse domain name hijacking — Grupo Milano

Clothing firm tried to get Milano.com through UDRP.

Grupo Milano, S.A., owner of clothing stores in Mexico, has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name Milano.com.

The firm made some rather ridiculous claims in the UDRP it filed with World Intellectual Property Organization.

It tried to buy the domain name through Sedo. A Sedo broker told Grupo Milano that its offer would likely not be accepted since the value of the domain name was estimated to be regarding EUR 50,000. The clothing firm responded:

Based on the Complainant’s research, the average value of a domain name is USD 268, as stated by various other websites.

Grupo Milano also claimed:

The Respondent placed a robots.txt file in the root directory of the website to which the Disputed Domain Name resolves, which can be evidence of bad faith.

I sure hope this isn’t the full claim it made to the panel, since every site ought to have a robots.txt file. Perhaps it meant that it blocked search engines through robots.txt.

The complainant also pointed to the respondent’s registration of mexico-city.net as proof that the respondent likely knew of the clothing firm’s trademarks. What this actually shows is that the respondent registers a lot of geo domain names. Following all, Milano.com is a geo domain name for the Italian city English speakers refer to as Milan.