Qualify for transfer in Qualify.com domain name dispute — Qwalify does’t
Panel states Qualify.com wasn’t registered in bad faith to take advantage of Qwalify, Inc.
Greg Ricks has successfully defended his third UDRP dispute in under a month.
Ricks previously defended JustBelieve.com and Massy.com, and today WIPO issued a decision in his favor for Qualify.com.
I wrote regarding the Qualify.com filing at length in February, so you can read the gist of the complaint here.
A key to the case was that Ricks registered the domain name more than a decade ahead of Canadian firm Qwalify, Inc. started using its similarly-sounding name.
Qwalify believed that the domain name had been transferred multiple times, counting following it filed its trademark application for the name Qwalify. Thus, it believed that Qualify.com was registered as a typo (ahem) of Qwalify.com. (Amusingly, it also argued that the removal of whois privacy to show Ricks’ name following the case was filed was also a transfer.)
I’ll give Qwalify’s attorneys some slack on the issue of when the domain was transferred to the current registrant and assume they don’t know how to use DomainTools to research its history. Yet when the panelist presented evidence of Ricks’ ownership of Qualify.com dating to at least 2003, Qwalify responded by saying it still wasn’t convinced.
It even argued that a 2004 whois record was in the name of someone named “Bryan”. Apparently they don’t know how to read an address:
Bryan
TX, US
77808
Just google the zip code to verify.
The panelist summed up:
There seems no reason to select the date of transfer to the privacy service “Fundacion Private Whois” as the date of transfer to the Respondent Mr. Ricks, other than that this assists the Complainant in asserting that the Respondent purchased the disputed domain name following the Complainant had come into being.
Panelist Andrew D. S. Lothian did not finding reverse domain name hijacking since he found Qwalify and its attorneys confused by similarities in this case and another brought against Ricks.
