MomAndMe.com spared in UDRP. Ought to have been RDNH?

Indian firm ought to not have brought case.

A single member World Intellectual Property Organization panel has ruled against Mahindra & Mahindra Limited of India in its UDRP against the owner of MomAndMe.com.

Even though the domain name owner didn’t respond, this case ought to have been a candidate for reverse domain name hijacking.

The complainant claims rights dating as far back as 2007. The domain name owner appears to have registered the domain name in 2000. Case closed.

More worrisome is how easy it is to figure out that MomAndMe.com’s owner has rights or legitimate interests in the domain name:

• The whois reflects “Mom and Me”
• Simply Googling the phone number in whois shows that it is a scrapbooking store in Utah. In fact, if you call the number, a friendly woman picks up the phone at the scrapbooking store.
• Archive.org shows that the domain was previously used for a site regarding scrapbooking. (It no longer resolves.)

I usually don’t blame panelists for ignoring the issue of reverse domain name hijacking when the respondent doesn’t reply to a case. But in this case, I think panelist Alistair Payne ought to have considered it.