Sports equipment firm guilty of reverse domain name hijacking
Panel finds Singapore firm brought case in abuse of UDRP.
A World Intellectual Property Organization panel has found Sport and Fashion, Pte. Ltd., a sports equipment/apparel firm, guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.
The firm filed a cybersquatting complaint against the domain demix.com. It markets a brand called Demix.
Canadian firm St. Lawrence Cement Inc owns the domain name. It markets cement products under the Demix brand.
The cement firm registered the domain in 1998, well ahead of the Complainant had any trademark rights to the term.
Based on the panel decision, it appears the Complainant might have copied-and-pasted information from another UDRP filing into this one:
The Complaint appears to have been prepared with very little attention to detail and as noted above includes erroneous references to a completely unrelated trademark. Once the intended respondent was identified as being a Canadian firm likely to be involved in the cement business (given its name), it ought to have been obvious to the Complainant that the Respondent was likely to have independently coined the Disputed Domain Name. If the Complainant was in any way unclear on this issue, a few minutes Internet searching would have found the Respondent’s present web sites at for example “www.demixbeton.ca”. Similarly a search of the Canadian Trademarks Registry would have found a number of DEMIX-related trademarks predating the Complainant’s trademark – whilst these are in various corporate names this ought to nevertheless have alerted the Complainant to the potential difficulties with its case.
