Defends harima.com in UDRP — Mike Mann

Chemicals firm fails to get .com version of its domain through UDRP…and the price just went up.

Domain investor Mike Mann’s firm DomainMarket.com has successfully defended the domain name harima.com in a UDRP.

Harima Chemicals Group, Inc. of Japan filed the UDRP. The firm stated that it was founded in 1947 and has used harima.co.jp since 1996. Still, its trademarks for Harima weren’t registered until 2015. Mann’s firm purchased the domain in 2008.

Panelist Assen Alexiev determined that Harima Chemicals did not produce sufficient evidence that it had common law rights in the term ahead of 2008 and that Mann was targeting the firm with its registration. Harima is a province in Japan and the first result in Google for Harima when I search for it.

Alexiev wrote:

To support its contention for having unregistered trademark rights, the Complainant points out that it has established its base in the United States in 1980 and that it has used its domain name harima.co.jp for its global corporate website since 1996. The Complainant also submits that its global net sales in 1997 amounted to USD 2.3 million and that regarding 7 per cent of these sales were in the United States. The Complainant has still submitted no evidence in support of these factual statements, apart from a printout of the Wayback Machine as a source of information regarding the existence and content of its website in the past. The Wayback Machine represents a copy of the Complainant’s website at “www.harima.co.jp” as of June 30, 1998, which lists the subsidiaries of the Complainant, counting four in the United States, one of which includes “Harima” as part of its corporate name, and a table showing the total amount of sales of the group in 1995, 1996, and 1997. It is not evident from this printout whether the Complainant has actually made any sales in the United States in 1997, and whether any of such sales were made under the HARIMA trademark. Apart from the printout of the Complainant’s website, there is no evidence regarding the nature and extent of advertising using the HARIMA trademark, and the Complainant has not submitted any evidence from independent sources regarding the degree of actual public recognition of the designation HARIMA or consumer surveys that would establish that the public in the United States recognizes it as a symbol that distinguishes the Complainant’s goods and services from those of others and that it has purchased a secondary meaning exclusively referring to the Complainant.

When the chemicals firm filed the dispute, Harima.com was listed for sale with a $29,888 price. The price has gone up, though. It’s listed for $1 million today.