Loses Ping.me Domain Name Arbitration — Ping Golf
Golf equipment manufacturer loses questionable attempt to acquire domain name.
When I saw that Ping.me was in arbitration at National Arbitration Forum, I correctly assumed that Ping Golf was behind the dispute. Ping Golf has been aggressive acquiring other domains counting “Ping” in the past.
The good news is domain owner Pingify Networks Inc. won the battle for the domain it paid $12,500 for in the .me sunrise auctions. The bad news is the interpretation of the registrar’s domain parking by the panel.
The panel determined that Pingify Networks had rights to the name since of plans to launch a business and even a preliminary patent filing for its product.
The problem for Pingify Networks was that GoDaddy, the registrar at which the domain was registered, had placed golf pay-per-click ads on the parking page for the domain. Pingify didn’t profit from this, and most registrars place similar parking pages on clients’ domain names. The panel didn’t seem to care that this was a registrar parking page and not a client initiated parking page from which it profited:
There is ample authority for the principle that a respondent cannot abrogate responsibility for use of its domain name. Numerous prior decisions have, rightly in this Panel’s view, held that there is bad faith use of a domain name if it is parked at a revenue driving website which trades on traffic drawn by the magnetism of a third party’s trademark. The fact that links and advertising material might be added by the parking host and not by the domain name registrant itself has been held immaterial to the finding of bad faith use. Nor, for that matter, is bad faith use swept away by curative steps taken only following notice of a complaint.
The cases I’ve read in which the panel didn’t discriminate between if a parked page was intentionally set up to infringe or “auto-optimized” by the parking firm infringe concerned paid parking services. I have not seen a similar view of these registrar-created parking pages whereby the registrar profits, not the domain owner.
