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closed EC.com Appraisal
- Thread starter Fearless
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This thread has been closed by the original author or DNF staff member.
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qak
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$100k+++++++++ ! 
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Priceless
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Dan, the Complainant in that case, Electronic Commerce Media Inc, stated at the outset of the proceedings and quoted in the NAF panel's decision :
In August 1996, Complainant (through a predecessor-in-interest) began using the mark EC.COM in connection with a monthly printed magazine in the field of electronic commerce. The EC.COM magazine had a subscriber base of more than 40,000 subscribers, and it is estimated that EC.COM reached at least 100,000 persons each month. Complainant applied for, and was granted, federal trademark registrations for the marks "EC.COM" and "EC.COM" (stylized).
Complainant states that it suspended publication of EC.COM in 1998, due in large part to Respondentââ¬â¢s use of the corresponding domain name ec.com, which caused consumer confusion and negative publicity resulting from the auction. During the suspension, Complainant continued to use the marks in connection with the sale of the subscriber list for the EC.COM magazine. Moreover, Complainantââ¬â¢s principal stated in sworn declaration testimony that Complainant intends to re-launch publication of a printed and/or online version of EC.COM by December 2000."
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Originally posted by Duke of Earl
Sounds like you are getting up close and a little TOO personal there Pops!
Exactly my thought
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Dont you all know that "E" prefixes are out of date!?? I wouldnt even pay reg fee for it..
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Well, it serves them right for naming a magazine after a domain they didn't own, doesn't it? Should that give them the right to reverse-hijack the domain from its legitimate owner? Apparently the UDRP judge thought so. The other case I know of where somebody succeeded in reverse-hijacking a domain by naming some non-online thing after it was the paint.biz STOP decision. But in most other cases, panelists have said it's "tough luck" if you name a trademarked product after a domain you don't own... that doesn't give you the right to grab it.
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Some related discussion from my Dan's Domain Site:
A company needn't exist yet for you to cybersquat it!
In what strikes me as one of the more bizarre decisions, the arbitrators have forced the transfer of ec.com to an e-commerce magazine named "EC.com", which adopted and trademarked that name despite not actually owning the domain in question (which had already been registered by somebody else). The domain was subsequently sold to a third party, against whom the publishers were able to prevail in the arbitration decision. I find this very troubling, since it means that companies might be able to steal any domain they want by naming one of their products after it, .com suffix and all, and then filing a claim. Penguin Books is getting under some fire for naming a book "katie.com" when they don't own that domain (as I recount in my Other Disputes page), but at least they didn't try to steal it away from its owner. (They did, in an unrelated case, try to take penguin.org away from a person nicknamed "Penguin" who used that domain for his personal site, but failed.)
Another attempt to do the same thing has failed, though. In the sealstore.com case, a company went into business as "Sealstore.com, L.L.C." despite not owning the referenced domain name, and then filed a challenge against the owner of the domain (who had registered it before the complaining company even existed) for infringement of the alleged common law trademark rights they had in the name. (The "seals" being sold in this store, by the way, are industrial sealing system components, not baby seals that have been clubbed to death, so environmentalists can stop protesting.) While the respondent's own rights to the name were weak (the domain merely links into the respondent's main site which is at a different domain name, and they haven't used "SealStore" as their trade name or trademark), there was still no possibility of bad faith under such circumstances, so the respondent got to keep the domain. It's a sensible decision by panelist Judge Irving H. Perluss (Retired), who is also responsible for some more good decisions I recount below. These decisions made him one of the panelists I liked and respected... at least until he handed down the truly awful sex.biz case. I did wish, however, that he had taken a more forceful position in denouncing what I see as the thoroughly reprehensible practice of registering a trade name, trademark, or other identifying name consisting of a domain name you don't actually own (complete with the .com or other TLD at the end of it), and then filing a challenge against the (pre-existing) owner of that domain on the grounds of name infringement. (The above-mentioned barcelona.com case fits into this category, as the city of Barcelona has attempted to register trademarks to barcelona.com, barcelona.org, barcelona.net, and barcelona.edu, all without actually owning any of these domains, and when the .edu domain isn't even one they're eligible to obtain since it's limited to 4-year degree granting institutions.)
A couple more attempted reverse hijackings of this variety both failed, and were apparently initiated by either the same person or by people acting in concert, as one of the complaints even carelessly left in some mistaken references to the domain being sought in the other case -- haven't they ever heard of the "global replace" feature in most word processors and text editors? Anyway, the complainants tried to win the transfer of america.com and tobacco.com from their long-standing registrants by forming companies named "America.com" and "Tobacco.com" respectively, applying for U.S. and Canadian trademarks to those names, and, with those trademark applications still pending (and quite likely to be rejected due to the generic nature of those names and the fact that the applicant has yet to show the slightest evidence of having actually used the names in commerce), filing complaints against the domain holders who had the names half a decade before the complainant concocted this scheme. Fortunately, the panelists didn't buy this, and rejected the "America" case; apparently the complainant then proceeded to drop the "Tobacco" case, since it's now terminated with no publicly-posted decision, though the owner of that domain has some related documents posted at his site.
The strategy of trademarking a domain name you don't actually own in order to reverse-hijack it appears to be more successful in the area of new top level domains. For instance, in the paint.biz case, a company managed to win this highly generic name by using "paint.biz" as some sort of product name or slogan (I'm not sure of the exact context) in between the time the .biz TLD was first announced and the time the startup process was completed with somebody else getting the name.
In the "When Good Decisions Happen To Bad People" department, the eduction.com decision involved a rather unlikeable respondent, somebody who registers tons of domains -- many of them typos of famous names -- and points them all at his really sleazy site that pops up heaps of ad windows and makes it hard for you to escape (known as "mouse-trapping"). He's got the sort of site nobody in his right mind goes to on purpose, so he depends on people getting there by mistake. He's lost a long series of cybersquatting cases so far. But he won this one, and deserved it. He had registered eduction.com as a misspelling of "education" (and claimed, in his defense, that one educational aspect of his site was that it taught people not to misspell "education"!). A year or so later, along came a newly-founded company called E-Duction with its Web site at e-duction.com. It's some sort of credit-card plan for use as an employee benefit with payments automatically deducted from future paychecks ("e-duction" is derived, apparently, from "deduction"). This company, which didn't exist yet when eduction.com was registered, proceeded to challenge that domain as a "typo-squatting" infringement of their own name. While clearly taking a dislike to the respondent, the 3-member panel ruled in his favor on the grounds that it's quite a stretch to say he registered the name in bad faith against a company that didn't exist yet! I concur with this decision.
The case of thefarm.com wasn't really a grave miscarriage of justice, even though the complainant won over a very generic-seeming name based on what is probably a fairly weak trademark -- it was a respondent default, so if the owner of the domain didn't even bother to put up a defense, he probably deserves whatever happens to him. (Right around the same time, the owner of the similarly generic domain myroom.com won a case to keep the domain, so such names can be kept if you fight for them.) However, the panel in thefarm.com used some dubious reasoning. For one thing, the trademark in question was registered in 1995, while the domain was registered in 1994. This doesn't necessarily dispose of all valid claims the mark holder has to the name -- they might have had common law rights prior to the registration -- but it's distressing that the panel didn't seem to even feel the need to bring this up, but rather just noted that the domain was identical to the trademark, and that was that, ignoring completely the dates involved. But then, when judging whether the respondent had rights or legitimate interests to the domain himself, suddenly the order of events became relevant: "Respondentââ¬â¢s legitimate interest must exist prior to the registration of the domain name and not after continued use". This is a clause that is not found anywhere in domain name policy; it's just another "rule" made up by a panelist. By this standard, few of the silly "dot-com" companies of the last few years would have legitimate rights to their names, since they didn't begin conducting trademarkable activity under them until they had registered the domain. Not that eliminating those silly "dot-com" companies would necessarily be a bad thing for the world in general, but it's certainly not what the domain dispute policy was intended to do.
A company needn't exist yet for you to cybersquat it!
In what strikes me as one of the more bizarre decisions, the arbitrators have forced the transfer of ec.com to an e-commerce magazine named "EC.com", which adopted and trademarked that name despite not actually owning the domain in question (which had already been registered by somebody else). The domain was subsequently sold to a third party, against whom the publishers were able to prevail in the arbitration decision. I find this very troubling, since it means that companies might be able to steal any domain they want by naming one of their products after it, .com suffix and all, and then filing a claim. Penguin Books is getting under some fire for naming a book "katie.com" when they don't own that domain (as I recount in my Other Disputes page), but at least they didn't try to steal it away from its owner. (They did, in an unrelated case, try to take penguin.org away from a person nicknamed "Penguin" who used that domain for his personal site, but failed.)
Another attempt to do the same thing has failed, though. In the sealstore.com case, a company went into business as "Sealstore.com, L.L.C." despite not owning the referenced domain name, and then filed a challenge against the owner of the domain (who had registered it before the complaining company even existed) for infringement of the alleged common law trademark rights they had in the name. (The "seals" being sold in this store, by the way, are industrial sealing system components, not baby seals that have been clubbed to death, so environmentalists can stop protesting.) While the respondent's own rights to the name were weak (the domain merely links into the respondent's main site which is at a different domain name, and they haven't used "SealStore" as their trade name or trademark), there was still no possibility of bad faith under such circumstances, so the respondent got to keep the domain. It's a sensible decision by panelist Judge Irving H. Perluss (Retired), who is also responsible for some more good decisions I recount below. These decisions made him one of the panelists I liked and respected... at least until he handed down the truly awful sex.biz case. I did wish, however, that he had taken a more forceful position in denouncing what I see as the thoroughly reprehensible practice of registering a trade name, trademark, or other identifying name consisting of a domain name you don't actually own (complete with the .com or other TLD at the end of it), and then filing a challenge against the (pre-existing) owner of that domain on the grounds of name infringement. (The above-mentioned barcelona.com case fits into this category, as the city of Barcelona has attempted to register trademarks to barcelona.com, barcelona.org, barcelona.net, and barcelona.edu, all without actually owning any of these domains, and when the .edu domain isn't even one they're eligible to obtain since it's limited to 4-year degree granting institutions.)
A couple more attempted reverse hijackings of this variety both failed, and were apparently initiated by either the same person or by people acting in concert, as one of the complaints even carelessly left in some mistaken references to the domain being sought in the other case -- haven't they ever heard of the "global replace" feature in most word processors and text editors? Anyway, the complainants tried to win the transfer of america.com and tobacco.com from their long-standing registrants by forming companies named "America.com" and "Tobacco.com" respectively, applying for U.S. and Canadian trademarks to those names, and, with those trademark applications still pending (and quite likely to be rejected due to the generic nature of those names and the fact that the applicant has yet to show the slightest evidence of having actually used the names in commerce), filing complaints against the domain holders who had the names half a decade before the complainant concocted this scheme. Fortunately, the panelists didn't buy this, and rejected the "America" case; apparently the complainant then proceeded to drop the "Tobacco" case, since it's now terminated with no publicly-posted decision, though the owner of that domain has some related documents posted at his site.
The strategy of trademarking a domain name you don't actually own in order to reverse-hijack it appears to be more successful in the area of new top level domains. For instance, in the paint.biz case, a company managed to win this highly generic name by using "paint.biz" as some sort of product name or slogan (I'm not sure of the exact context) in between the time the .biz TLD was first announced and the time the startup process was completed with somebody else getting the name.
In the "When Good Decisions Happen To Bad People" department, the eduction.com decision involved a rather unlikeable respondent, somebody who registers tons of domains -- many of them typos of famous names -- and points them all at his really sleazy site that pops up heaps of ad windows and makes it hard for you to escape (known as "mouse-trapping"). He's got the sort of site nobody in his right mind goes to on purpose, so he depends on people getting there by mistake. He's lost a long series of cybersquatting cases so far. But he won this one, and deserved it. He had registered eduction.com as a misspelling of "education" (and claimed, in his defense, that one educational aspect of his site was that it taught people not to misspell "education"!). A year or so later, along came a newly-founded company called E-Duction with its Web site at e-duction.com. It's some sort of credit-card plan for use as an employee benefit with payments automatically deducted from future paychecks ("e-duction" is derived, apparently, from "deduction"). This company, which didn't exist yet when eduction.com was registered, proceeded to challenge that domain as a "typo-squatting" infringement of their own name. While clearly taking a dislike to the respondent, the 3-member panel ruled in his favor on the grounds that it's quite a stretch to say he registered the name in bad faith against a company that didn't exist yet! I concur with this decision.
The case of thefarm.com wasn't really a grave miscarriage of justice, even though the complainant won over a very generic-seeming name based on what is probably a fairly weak trademark -- it was a respondent default, so if the owner of the domain didn't even bother to put up a defense, he probably deserves whatever happens to him. (Right around the same time, the owner of the similarly generic domain myroom.com won a case to keep the domain, so such names can be kept if you fight for them.) However, the panel in thefarm.com used some dubious reasoning. For one thing, the trademark in question was registered in 1995, while the domain was registered in 1994. This doesn't necessarily dispose of all valid claims the mark holder has to the name -- they might have had common law rights prior to the registration -- but it's distressing that the panel didn't seem to even feel the need to bring this up, but rather just noted that the domain was identical to the trademark, and that was that, ignoring completely the dates involved. But then, when judging whether the respondent had rights or legitimate interests to the domain himself, suddenly the order of events became relevant: "Respondentââ¬â¢s legitimate interest must exist prior to the registration of the domain name and not after continued use". This is a clause that is not found anywhere in domain name policy; it's just another "rule" made up by a panelist. By this standard, few of the silly "dot-com" companies of the last few years would have legitimate rights to their names, since they didn't begin conducting trademarkable activity under them until they had registered the domain. Not that eliminating those silly "dot-com" companies would necessarily be a bad thing for the world in general, but it's certainly not what the domain dispute policy was intended to do.
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friend of mine registered swreg.com (software register) way way back. Some time later, a company 'swreg' was registered. The owner requested to buy the domain swreg.com but my friend refused to sell. The company then threatened and filed. He charged my friend with bad intent, stating that swreg.com was not developed and the owner of the domain was simply helding his company hostage, etc. After an extremely quick review of the facts (my friend did not even have to hire a lawyer, the whole thing took 2 weeks) he received an official ruling in his favor simply because his domain was registered beofre the company.
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The publisher of the (defunct, but supposedly to be revived) magazine, which had foolishly been named after a domain name they didn't own, claimed that the actual owner of that domain was acting in bad faith by trying to sell it. Then, apparently, after succeeding in this reverse hijacking, they proceeded to sell it (rather than to revive the magazine as they claimed to the panel). I guess it's only bad faith when the original respondent did it?
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Speaking of graphics:
Just out of pure boredom i played around with my graphic softwares and came up with these variations of logos for your ec.com :
http://nudiva.de/ecset2.gif
If you wanna use one of these, just let me know which number and i'll send you the files - free of course
Just out of pure boredom i played around with my graphic softwares and came up with these variations of logos for your ec.com :
http://nudiva.de/ecset2.gif
If you wanna use one of these, just let me know which number and i'll send you the files - free of course
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Originally posted by beatz
Speaking of graphics:
Just out of pure boredom i played around with my graphic softwares and came up with these variations of logos for your ec.com :
http://nudiva.de/ecset2.gif
If you wanna use one of these, just let me know which number and i'll send you the files - free of course
You must want the site to look good for your brokering.
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