Rental Fails to Show Rights in National.com Typo — National Car
An interesting UDRP case for car rental chain.
Vanguard Trademark Holding, which holds the trademarks for National Car Rental, has failed to win the domain name Natonal.com in a UDRP. This is despite:
– Natonal.com resolving to a parked page full of ads for car rental
– The domain owner not responding to the UDRP
So why did Vanguard fail? It based its premise primarily on Natonal.com being confusingly similar to the firm’s “National Car Rental” mark. The panelist pointed out that Natonal might be confusingly similar to National, but it’s not similar at all to the full three word mark. Vanguard argued it had rights to “National” as well, but apparently the lawyer didn’t focus on this and didn’t submit evidence. So Vanguard didn’t even clear the first hurdle of a UDRP.
Here’s something else that’s interesting. If anything, Natonal.com is a typo of National.com, which National Car Rental doesn’t even own! National.com is owned by National Semiconductor. Yes, it’s clear that the parked page at Natonal.com is targeting people looking for the car rental firm, but can you imagine if an arbitration panel handed over a typo of a third party’s URL just since of how it was targeting ads?
