Wins Case Against California Agency — Texas Domainer

Attorney and domain investor wins case brought by California train service.

Texas attorney, lobbyist, and domain investor Ramiro Canales has successfully defended an attack on one of his firm’s domain names, CapitolCorridor.com.

Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority, which manages a Northern California train service, filed the complaint under UDRP. The train service has a web presence at CapitolCorridor.org.

“California is in a financial mess, but it somehow found the funds to file an UDRP,” stated Canales. “I hope California learned not to mess with Texas.”

This was Canales’ first UDRP. He defended it himself under one of his firms, NameLitigation.com.

The panelist determined that Canales’ firm had legitimate rights in the domain name and it was not registered in bad faith. For four years following registering the domain name, Canales forwarded it to his network of sites counting MyCapitol.com. He then parked the domain name with a service that provided links to train service. Ahead of receiving the UDRP complaint, Canales removed the parking page and continued forwarding the domain name to MyCapitol.com.

The arbitration panel found that the parked page was bad faith usage, but that clearly the domain name was not registered in bad faith and has been used for a legitimate purpose.

One of Canales’ arguments was that the governmental agency took 6 years to file the complaint and this was “evidence of an absence of consumer confusion or establishes rights in the Respondent to use the domain name.” The agency argued that it just became aware of the registration of CapitolCorridor.com, but the panelist was not convinced.

“The Panel gives this unsupported assertion little weight, as it is difficult to believe that the owners of capitolcorridor .org could reasonably remain unaware of the existence of capitolcorridor .com for over six years,” wrote the panelist in the decision.

You can view the full text of the decision here.