In cybersquatting complaint over Lens.in — Lens.com fails

Lens.com not seeing so clearly.

Online contact lens retailer Lens.com has failed to win a cybersquatting claim (pdf) against the domain name Lens.in.

Lens.com filed the dispute under the .IN Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (INDRP).

The panelist determined that Lens.com doesn’t have any rights in the term “lens”, just lens.com. That would not give it rights to Lens.in, and this caused the rest of the case to fail.

INDRP is very similar to UDRP, except that the third element of use in bad faith states “registration OR use” instead of “registration AND use”. The policy actually contradicts itself on this issue, using OR instead of AND in one spot.

Despite the similarity, INDRP has proven to be extremely complainant-friendly. It has been used to turn over the domains Web.in, Jobs.in, Honey.in and All.in.

There’s a bit of a wrinkle in the Lens.in case. There’s some question over the ownership of the domain name, and the panelist determined that the registry can cancel the Lens.in domain name registration.

If anyone is familiar with dropping .in domain names, they might want to keep an eye out for this.