Diners Club Lose Domain Disputes — Sears and
Two big firms fail to impress domain arbitrators.
To big firms — merchandiser Sears and credit provider Diners Club International — found themselves on the losing end of domain disputes yesterday.
Sears lost a challenge for the domain names my-gofer.biz/info/net/org and mygofer.info. Sears has been using the trademark in commerce for a delivery service. But the domain owner, Dann J. Flesher, has been using the my-gofer.org domain name for an actual business unrelated to Sears’ use of the term.
The other domain names were registered at GoDaddy, and Sears claimed that the links on the parking pages there were competitive to its service. It also claimed that the domain name was listed for sale, citing a link to GoDaddy’s “Domain Buy Service”. Of course, this link was just an ad for GoDaddy’s service that helps people buy by now registered domain names. It’s impossible to know what the Sears lawyer was thinking, but he either didn’t understand what he saw on the parked page or tried to pull a fast one on the arbitrator.
Diners Club International lost a case for ContactDiners.com. Here again, the complainant pointed to a parked domain name at GoDaddy, which was automatically placed by the registrar. The domain owner stated that he had a history of purchasing “contact” domain names and was not targeting Diners Club. He is the registrant of ContactShoppers.com, ContactTourists.com, and ContactGolfers.com. But Diners Club didn’t get past the first UDRP requirement, as the panel found the domain name was not confusingly similar to its trademark for “Diners”.
