Tax appeal attorney guilty of reverse domain name hijacking — Illinois property

Anastasia Poulopoulos filed a cybersquatting dispute in bad faith, panelist determines.

The owner of Appealmytaxes.BIZ, which offers a service to challenge property tax assessments in Illinois, has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking in an attempt to get the domain name Appealmytaxes.COM.

Anastasia Poulopoulos filed the case with National Arbitration Forum arguing that the owner of AppealMyTaxes.com was cybersquatting. The owner of AppealMyTaxes.com registered the domain name ahead of Poulopoulos registered the matching .biz. Poulopoulous subsequently registered a figurative mark made up mostly of text that reads “WWW.APPEALMYTAXES.BIZ OUR ONLY BIZNESS IS LOWERING YOUR REAL ESTATE TAXES”.

Not surprisingly, the panel didn’t find that this trademark was confusingly similar to the domain name AppealMyTaxes.com. It also found that the domain wasn’t registered in bad faith, which was the reason panelist David L. Kreider determined that Poulopoulos had engaged in reverse domain name hijacking.

It appears to the Panel that the Complainant became aware of the Respondent’s registration on May 12, 2008 of the DDN , and within weeks, acted to register her own “appealmytaxes.biz” domain name and file an application with the USPTO on June 23, 2008 to register the trademark WWW.APPEALMYTAXES.BIZ OUR ONLY BIZNESS IS LOWERING YOUR REAL ESTATE TAXES, with the intention of competing in the same professional services business as the Respondent had launched, or at that time, appeared to be preparing to launch.

The Panel concludes that the Complainant instituted these UDRP proceedings knowing that the Respondent was prior in time in registering the DDN and that the Complainant could not possibly establish the element of bad faith registration by the Respondent, which is required under the Policy Paragraph 4(a)(iii).

The Panel finds that the Complainant has engaged in Reverse Domain Name Hijacking.