- Joined
- Aug 16, 2004
- Messages
- 1,239
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- 36
Ilze has a good grasp of this.
For those who do not know the entire story, we were hired to pick up the domain last year when it became clear that Treasury Board - the Government of Canada - was no longer going to keep the domain.
The domain was back-ordered at a number of registrars, and our company 'won' the auction for around $2k in January. I was on the road at the time, so I do not know all of the details, but my understanding is MyID did not 'award' the registration right away, and so someone in our company did check on it, and ran it against our backorders as being a new order. This revealed that TDL - that is the Tim Horton license business - had filed for a trade-mark late in 2012.
Naturally, the complications began: Mark informed the client that the domain could not be transferred for 60 days as MyID had put the domain on its own account, and they said they would not release payment until they were sure they could get the domain. I suspect they had something more in the background because we also notified them of the Tims application at CIPO. Technically, if there would ever be a dispute over that registration, the domain name registration is prior to the registration date of any potential trade-mark, but the usage of the name in association with restaurants and food service is so well-known that this would the rare case where a so-called common trade-mark would exist even without a registration.
The client finally released payment to us and we contacted MyID, but they auctioned of the domain - apparently one week after we contacted them - because the domain was not paid on the original due date.-
From our side, I know we did not want to hold this domain directly, and it was decided we would wait on the client, but on the other hand, it does seem like MyID made an extra $3k by selling this registration even after the original buyer offered payment. People can say we should have simply paid up front, but the risk to us was that the client might have skipped out on us due to the TDL trade-mark application. At the same time, MyID had locked up the domain and put it into its own account, and therefore could not transfer the domain for 60 days anyway, so I understand why our client waited to see what transpired.
In the end MyID made a fat profit, we found a fine alternative domain for our customer to buy which meets their goals, and the TDL people are going to either pay $5k to lawyers to take tims.ca away, or they will reimburse the owner what they paid MyID for the registration.
Live and learn.
