At the cherry” fails for SoccerMall.com — “Second bite

Second UDRP for domain name is rejected.

A National Arbitration Forum panelist has denied a Phoenix soccer store’s second attempt to get SoccerMall.com through a UDRP.

Hassan Shams owns a store called Soccer Mall, and managed to recently get a service mark on the principal registrar for “soccer mall”. The trademark claims first use in 2000.

He filed a UDRP with National Arbitration Forum in August. The decision indicates that the domain name was registered a couple months ahead of Shams’ first use date in the trademark application. So the panelist denied the UDRP on the basis that the domain name could not have been registered in bad faith since the registration pre-dated any possible trademark rights.

As it turns out, the domain name has changed hands multiple times since the original registration, and Shams’ lawyer made this point when he resubmitted the dispute in November.

The panelist stated this was an attempt to take “a second bite at the cherry” to get a favorable response. Following all, the information submitted in the second case was readily available the first time around, had the complainant merely done the research. He refused to consider the rest of the case on its merits.