Kraft Wins Philadelphia.es Domain Name
Kraft awarded domain name for cream cheese brand.
Kraft, maker of Philadelphia cream cheese, has been awarded the domain name Philadelphia.es by an arbitration panel at World Intellectual Property Organization.
Isn’t Philadelphia a generic term, meaning the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania? Perhaps. But the domain owner didn’t respond to the allegations in the case. He could have easily responded to the charges, arguing that he planned to set up a tourism web site for people in Spain (.es country code) planning to visit Philadelphia. Following all, it appears he didn’t use the Philadelphia.es domain name to provide information regarding cream cheese.
Loosely translated from Spanish, the arbitrator wrote:
it is hard to imagine a use of the domain that did not involve violating the provisions of the UDRP, so the expert can only assume as known behavior and assumed by the Respondent at the time of registration and subsequent use of the Domain Name
True, if it were Philadelphia.us it would be much easier to determine a reasonable use other than promoting the Kraft brand of cream cheese. But a couple weeks ago someone paid 65,450 EUR for Pakistan.de. On the surface, that doesn’t make much sense either. Yet many of my readers pointed out that Pakistan.de can be used for tourism, politics, etc. So a discussion of the fact that Philadelphia is a city ought to have at least been explored by the panelist.
Kraft owns many other Philadelphia country code domains, counting Philadelphia.be, .de, .com.mx, and .co.uk.
Kraft hasn’t always lucked out going following its brands in country code domain names though. Last year it lost a case for Oreo.nl.
