John Berryhill schools a UDRP complainant — See how
Berryhill brings it home in ican.com case.
John Berryhill has successfully defended Digimedia’s domain name ican.com in a UDRP brought by Galaxy Rainbow Limited in Hong Kong.
Berryhill pokes a number of holes in Galaxy Rainbow’s case, but really brings it home in the “registered in bad faith” section. For your reading enjoyment:
…the Respondent registered the domain name in 1998 – ten years prior to the earliest evidence of a trademark registration presented in the Complaint. Accordingly, it is not possible for the domain name to have been registered in bad faith. The use to which the domain name has been put during the last 15 years is discussed in the previous section. The Complaint uses the word “preemptively” to suggest that the Respondent had some sort of responsibility to know and predict future events, and that someone else would want the domain name in a dispute filed nearly fifteen years later.
Are we seriously to believe that an adult of ordinary mental capability can make this accusation and expect to be believed, let alone a legal professional with a duty to exercise competence? The Complainant apparently expects this Panel to believe that the Respondent has psychic abilities to “preemptively” know the future actions of others, and registered this domain name in 1998 from its office in Oklahoma, since the Respondent knew that some unheard-of entity would claim trademark rights in Hong Kong in 2008. This type of nonsense ought to not be tolerated from grownups, and yet the Respondent has to address exactly this type of abject foolishness on a regular basis.
The Complainant has made the insulting accusation that the Respondent is a cybersquatter on the basis of no rational theory whatsoever. The Complainant, knowing that the UDRP decisions are made public, intends its insult to the Respondent to be a public one. The operative facts here on the point of bad faith registration do not differ at all from other cases involving this Respondent,
which any competent Complainant is able to determine in mere seconds from the UDRP search capabilities provided by UDRP providers, or even from a Google search of “Digimedia domain dispute”. The Respondent respectfully requests to know from this Panel whether or not there is any duty of diligence whatsoever binding upon complainants in these proceedings to do even that much, or any
duty of competence to know the basics of the Policy under which a licensed legal professional engages to practice.
The panel copped out on finding reverse domain name hijacking.
