DataMiner.co nailed for reverse domain name hijacking over DataMiner.com — Owner of
Firm filed UDRP following failing to negotiate a purchase of DataMiner.com.
Skyline Communications NV, which operates a business at DataMiner.co, have been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name DataMiner.com.
The firm filed a cyberquatting complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization against WebMagic, a firm that registered the .com domain name in 1996. That’s well ahead of Skyline started using the DataMiner name.
Skyline then tried the buy the domain name multiple times starting in 2005. It failed to strike a deal. It filed the UDRP shortly following obtaining a trademark for the term DataMiner.
The three-person panel stated the case ought to have never been filed:
n the view of the Panel this is a complaint which ought to never have been launched. The Complainant and its lawyer ought to have appreciated that establishing registration and use in bad faith in respect of a domain name which had first been registered nearly two decades ago was likely to involve difficult considerations. The Complainant appears to have ignored any such considerations. The Complainant ought to have known that there was no case under the third requirement of the Policy, due to the lack of any use in bad faith of the disputed domain name. In the Complaint, no attempt was made to demonstrate the existence of bad faith registration or bad faith use. In addition, the Complainant contacted the Respondent a number of times in the years 2005, 2010 and 2014 to try to buy the disputed domain name with no success. Following its trademark was registered, the Complainant decided to launch this complaint under the Policy. Finally there are a number of of the Complainant’s factual and legal contentions that border on the misleading. As an example the Panel mentions the incomplete quote of the holding in the Torus case, as pointed out by the Respondent; mischaracterizing the Respondent’s business (see Response, Annexes 5 and 6); referring to the Respondent’s activities as “cybersquatting” on no more authority than its own judgment (a search by the Panel found no case in which the Respondent was a respondent on the WIPO data base and only two cases on the National Arbitration Forum data base, in both of which the complaint was denied); and calling its mark “not descriptive”.
It’s worth noting that one of the panelists was Andrew Christie, a panelist known to occasionally go out of his way to find in favor of complainants.
