Back Into UDRP Game — Verizon Gets

Verizon files four separate UDRP cases in past couple days.

For a while it seemed like Verizon had basically given up on filing UDRP cases. Instead, it opted to just file lawsuits against anyone with trademark typos, even modest fry.

That may be changing. The firm has filed four separate UDRP cases at World Intellectual Property Organization within the past two days.

One of those cases is for wwwverizon.com – a typo that ought to have been at the top of Verizon’s hit list from the beginning. It almost seems that the firm has been using a shotgun approach going following typosquatters, leaving the highest trafficked domains out there. Compete.com states this typo gets over 6,000 uniques a month.

Why switch to UDRP instead of lawsuits? It may be that these specific typosquatters have been hard to track down. In the case of verizonewireless.com, the whois record is constantly changing. wwwverizon.com and verzonwireless.com are owned by people in Russia and Poland, respectively.

Or perhaps, following years of filing lawsuits, the firm feels its determent efforts (lawsuits) have worked on everyone else they’ll work on. Now it’s time to use a cheaper method to get control of trademark typos.