Somehow wins Taget.com UDRP — Paul Keating
Shoddy work by Target’s lawyers may have let domain owner off the hook.
Domain attorney Paul Keating has successfully defended Quinv S.A. against Target Brands and a UDRP it filed over Taget.com.
Now, first things first: Taget.com isn’t necessarily a typo of Target.com. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to own this domain and ways you can use it without running afoul of cybersquatting rules.
But Target claimed the domain forwarded through a series of URLs to Target.com.
Following it filed its case this behavior apparently stopped.
But I just checked and the domain name sent me to Target.com through Sendori’s zero click service.
Quinv asserted that it wasn’t aware of what its parking provider (named as Sedo) may have been doing with the domain. It looks like the domain has been parked with Above.com’s parking service since at least the beginning of the year.
Furthermore, Quinv asserted in its defense that it’s not a “professional” domainer “and presumed that placing the Domain Name with SEDO and other monetizing providers would result in a directory page contextually related to the actual use of the word.”
Target called B.S. on this, noting that Quinv’s web page states little more than “Domain Investors” and “Domain Experts”.
I’m surprised the panelists didn’t call Quinv out on this. It’s also worth noting that DomainTools shows that Quinv’s email address is associated with 628 domains. That’s another strike against it’s notion that it doesn’t know what it’s doing.
The panel ruled against Target Brands in the case. I think there were a couple reasons the case ended up this way: Target’s lawyers didn’t understand exactly what it was doing, and the panelists didn’t understand how the domain was forwarded to Target either (to which you ought to blame Target’s lawyers).
Had Target’s lawyer been able to ascertain that the domain was parked on a domain optimization/rotating service, that it was sending traffic through Sendori, and noticed the number of domains Quinv owned, the result may have been very different. (It took me regarding 60 seconds to determine all of this.)
You know what would be the ultimate irony in this case? If Target was actually the Sendori client buying traffic. That’s more likely than you might imagine.
