One comment in the case which raised my brow "It has been repeatedly held that pay per click sites are not a legitimate use of a domain name"
Is this a fact ?
As someone noted, most UDRP's are won by the Complainant. That doesn't mean the UDRP is necessarily "unfair" - it is simply a reflection of the fact that lawyers don't generally waste their time and their client's money on frivolous filings. I would expect most UDRP's to be won by the Complainant simply for that reason.
If you look over the list of UDRP decisions, they most commonly involve well-known marks, and the Respondent most often does not file a response. Again, that's a reflection on the fact that the UDRP is designed for no-brainer cybersquatting situations.
The problem, though, is that a lot of these no-brainer cases have involved famous marks pointed to PPC pages. For that reason, you see a lot of UDRP decisions which casually say something to the effect of "PPC is illegitimate". It *is* illegitimate when the domain name is a close variant of a famous mark, and the results are all competitive with that product (due to PPC advertisers themselves targeting a competitor's mark).
In contested cases, there have been plenty of decisions - groceryoutlet.com, snowboardsforsale.com, and so forth in which the panel has had no problem finding that providing search results which relate to a generic term or concept is a legitimate use of a domain.
As far as costs go, no, there is no provision in the UDRP for recovering costs. The question has come up from time to time in ICANN policy discussions, but is usually dropped because the UDRP providers are private agencies which do not have a mechanism for collecting costs or damages. Also, there would be no way to amend the UDRP to provide that losing Complainants would have to pay but losing Respondents wouldn't have to pay. So, you have to balance whether or not you would want a cost recovery mechanism to cut both ways. Figure, even if you had a defense with merit, you might not feel like going through the effort to respond, and simply allow the domain name to be transferred. In that situation, would it be fair to have the UDRP provider chasing after you to pay fees?
This confirms my previous claim, if you can't afford a lawyer, forget about justice.
I have seen plenty of domain registrants successfully defend their own UDRP. From time to time, I will take a look at a pro se response and provide a couple of changes, pointers to relevant prior decisions, and other things that will improve the response, at minimal cost. Several attorneys who do a lot of UDRP responses - Ari Goldberger, Steve Sturgeon, Stevan Lieberman, Zak Muscovitch, Brett Lewis, to name a few - have become fairly efficient at rapidly preparing and filing responses. Using a three-member panel fee at, for example, WIPO, costs $2000 for the panel fees, and I might take anywhere from four to eight hours to draft a response depending on the fact pattern, at $250 per hour.
So, if you are looking at a domain name that is worth $20,000 or so, then it's a business decision whether it is worth spending, say, $5K to defend it or not. If the domain name isn't worth much at all, then the downside of losing it is not that great an injustice.
Any legal dispute may have an uncertain outcome. A lawyer may be able to put together an argument that is designed to present the facts in a manner that a panel may find persuasive, but these things ultimately depend on the facts themselves. You can't make a silk purse out of a pig's ear.
