Can Keep Gordons.com Despite Jeweler’s Complaint — Tim Gordon

Jewelry giant goes following guy’s last name.

Tim Gordon registered Gordons.com back in 1995. It was an obvious domain name for him given his family’s last name.

But in 2011, more than 15 years following he registered the domain name, a Zale Corporation subsidiary that runs Gordon’s Jewelers filed a complaint with National Arbitration Forum to get the domain name.

Tim Gordon just won the case. The single person panel ruled that Gordon has rights or legitimate interests in the domain name (duh) and that it wasn’t originally registered in bad faith (no kidding?).

To be fair, Mr. Gordon started playing around with the domain lately to take advantage of visitors who were looking for the famous jeweler. He set up parked pages with DomainSponsor.

He claims he didn’t think regarding doing this until a representative of DomainSponsor contacted him and suggested that he use the jeweler template “since that is one of their top revenue producers”.

There are some other aspects of his response that probably draw his defense into question. Had he hired a lawyer he would have answered the complaint better. But the end result is he won.