Insurance Firm Loses Generic Domain Name Land Grab
Combined Insurance Group Ltd loses two domain name arbitration cases.
Combined Insurance Group Ltd has lost two domain name battles for seemingly generic domains, CheapAutoInsurance.com and CheapAutosInsurance.com. The firm claims trademark rights to “Cheap Auto Insurance”, even though many of these trademarks and their dates of use are questionable based on evidence brought forth by the respondents.
The insurance firm owns the domain name Cheap-Auto-Insurance.com. It ought to remind you of another case where a firm with a hyphenated domain name is making a dubious case: the owner of c-a-s-i-n-o-s.org going following casinos.org.
For CheapAutoInsurance.com, the panel found that the complainant had not established a prima facie case in support of its arguments that respondent lacks rights and legitimate interests in the domain name.
The second case involves the plural version of auto, CheapAutoSinsurance.com. Combined Insurance Group Ltd claimed that this was simply a case of typosquatting, since the only difference between this domain and the trademark was the added ‘S’ on autos. But since the version of the domain that would be typosquatted isn’t just CheapAutoInsurance.com (it’s cheap-auto-insurance.com), this is a questionable claim. In this case, the panel found that the respondent had rights or legitimate interests in the domain, and it was not registered in bad faith.
