Domain shouldn’t have been lost in a UDRP, but… — This .yachts

The domain name owner had a great defense but didn’t reply to the filing.

A World Intellectual Property Organization panelist has ordered the domain name virgin.yachts be transferred to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Enterprises.

I did a doubletake when I saw this decision. In order to register a .yachts domain name, you have to be affiliated with a firm in the industry.

Indeed, the domain name virgin.yachts is registered in the name of a firm called Virgin Yachts that’s set up in Florida. Just looking at the whois record you can see that the owner of virgin.yachts owns virginyachtsllc.com, which forwards to virgin-yachts.com.

In other words, the respondent has a legitimate interest in the domain name and probably didn’t register it in bad faith.

There may well be a legitimate trademark dispute, but it falls outside the realm of UDRP.

Still, the owner didn’t respond to the UDRP. I think it ought to have been obvious to both the complainant and perhaps the panelist, but without the response, whatever the complainant stated was accepted by the panelist. The complainant obviously didn’t point out these facts.