Wins Another, and You Won’t Believe What the Complainant Argued — Kevin Ham

Complainant tells panel how it generated PPC results of its competitors.

Kevin Ham’s Vertical Axis has successfully defended BrightSign.com in a UDRP with the help of Ari Goldberger of ESQwire.

Vertical Axis won for a number of reasons, counting that the domain name was registered well ahead of the complainant started using the term “Bright Sign” in commerce. Of course, it’s also a generic domain name.

But the funny part is the ridiculous assertion BrightSign LLC made regarding how the parked domain name leads to competitors’ sites:

The website linked to the disputed domain name is simply a “parking site”. Immediately below the heading that states, “Welcome to brightsign.com,” there is a link that states: “Click here to make an offer on this domain name”. One click from the home page’s “business” link, consumers are directed to links of Complainant’s competitor, MVIX, when the words “digital sign” are entered into the search box, and to another competitor, Western Digital, when the words “digital media player” are entered. It is well settled that by directing traffic to sites of competitors or by confusing clients of Complainant, Respondent creates confusion with the intent of driving up the price of the disputed domain name, which constitutes bad faith under the Policy.

Now, I’ve seen complainants try to fool panels by showing printouts of competitors’ links on a parked page that were generated by entering a search term in the search box. But in this case the complainant actually told the panel that’s what it did!

Granted, the panel doesn’t address how these links were generated. But it came to the correct final conclusion anyway.