Today my company received a Notification of Complaint and Commencement of Administrative Proceeding from the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
This weighty communication, numbering probably around 200 pages of A4, was sent from Switzerland by UPS.
The jolly large multinational corporation that owns the trademark don’t seem to be too happy with a domain name that my company has registered, despite it being used to promote the products of that company.
The process seems to be they give loads of legalese documents, trademark certificates etc, and the WIPO have a committee meeting to decide if the domain name should be given to the trademark owner. Oh, my company could respond if it would like, if it doesn’t they’ll decide on the information they already have.
There’s not a cat in hells chance of keeping the domain. Win some, lose some!
We went through this some years ago. We registered a domain (a trade marked brand) as we working with the company at the time. We then got a letter from the companies american owners demanding that we give them the domain at no cost. Naturally we told them to get lost or pay the registration fee that we paid ($50).
It went downhill at that point – their lawyers must have been on 500 pounds an hour and it took them over 2 months to finally agree to pay the $50 costing them about 50,000 in legal fees. It was totally ridiculous and illustrates the complete lack of commercial nounce at some of these large corporates.
Classic stuff! These jokers seem to know the correct way to file a dispute, and even sent copies of previous disputes that they’ve won!
They seem to be hoovering up all domains with the trademark in. I’m failing to see what they’re getting from the exercise, apart from legal bills and a few domains they wont do anything with.
Good use of the word ‘hoovering’
Companies HAVE to protect the use of their trademarks otherwise the word can take on a generic usage and they can lose their trademark protection.
e.g. hoover
P
Just found your blog whilst searching for some local stuff in Bournemouth which is where I live and got reading as I also work in IM.
We have had loads of these legal situations arise and as mentioned above most are completely ridiculous, most have settled in the end with an agreement to just let the domain expire naturally and remove any offending content.