$500k Spent on URDP Been a Waste? — Has Lego’s

It’s hard to see rhyme or reason in Lego’s heavy use of UDRP.

Lego is a prolific filer of UDRP cases. I count 309 to date, with 100 by now in the second half of 2011. Recently all of the cases have been filed with the assistance of Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services.

At roughly $1,500 a pop not counting legal fees (and assuming WIPO isn’t cutting them a deal) that comes out to nearly a half million dollars spent on UDRP.

Lego sends cease and desist letters to a lot of site owners ahead of filing UDRPs, so it’s going following a much larger base of domains. That keeps the average cost per domain recovered much lower.

But does it make sense?

These aren’t domains like Legoo.com that the firm is going following. It seems to be any random domain that includes the trademark: lego-creative-block.com, lego-mindstorms-nxt.net, legotechnic8110.com.

I first thought that Lego was using UDRP only to take down sites that were selling Lego items. That’s often times the case. But in its first ever loss the domain was just registered this year and had only a registrar holding page on it when Lego filed its UDRP.

Spending $1,500+ to try to get LegoWorkshop.com which was just registered earlier this year?

Seems a bit odd to me.

Perhaps the news on sites like this and others regarding Lego’s prolific filings sends a warning to cybersquatters. But I’m not sure how effective it is. The firm might be better off filing a couple high profile lawsuits instead.