A three letter domain lost via UDRP
I’ve always thought that three letter, or possibly even four or five letter, domain names are probably invulnerable to transfer under the UDRP, because of the potential for the domain to be an acronym for so many possible business names, which would almost guarantee that a respondent could show some rights or legitimate interests in the name, causing any complaint to fail. Apparently, I was wrong, and a WIPO panel recently ordered the transfer of bjp.com to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of New Delhi, India.
(By the way, for a look at a truly awful website, check out the Respondent’s representative in this case, the-internet-lawyers.com. Be warned, very flash-intensive, but click on it and “enter” and you’ll get to the annoying music, strange layout, and … Latin gibberish text all over the place? Huh? Yeah, I don’t know, either. [Was corrected via Twitter, the "lorem ipsum" is not Latin, it's just nonsense. Thanks @greategress!])
After finding that “latches” [sic; it's laches] doesn’t apply in a UDRP case and finding that the bjp.com domain name was confusingly similar to the BJP mark, the panel proceeded to discuss the Respondent’s (lack of) rights or legitimate interests.
Based on the material presented in these proceedings, the Panel finds it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the pre-existing rights of the Complainant’s mark when it registered the disputed domain name as the Respondent resides in the city of Bangalore where the Complainant is widely known.
The Respondent has not filed any evidence in these proceedings to show that he had a business prior to 1997 to justify honest adoption of the name and registration of the disputed domain name. The documents submitted by the Respondent pertaining to its business is a certificate under Shops and Establishment Act dated July 2008. Further, there is no evidence on record to show that the disputed domain name was used during the period 1997 to 2008, and from this the Panel infers that the Respondent till 2008 passively held the disputed domain name. In its response the Respondent has stated that it proposes to the use of the website in connection with its business once the dispute is over. Mere assertion of a contemplated business plan is insufficient to establish rights and legitimate interests, particularly when contradicted by evidence of abusive conduct (Helen Fielding v. Anthony Corbert aka Anthony Corbett,WIPO Case No. D2000-1000)
Exhibit A of the Respondent’s supplemental submission shows screen shots of the archived website linked to the disputed domain name. On scrutinizing these, the Panel finds that the screen shots show some advertisements for a Hindi film on December 10, 2008 and links to news items dated February 16, 2009 and February 17, 2009. [Ed. Oops! Not good, fellas.] What is significant is that there appears to be little no original content on the website. The Panel is not convinced that the screen shots of the Web pages provided by the Respondent show the Respondent runs a bona fide publishing business or has used the disputed domain name in connection with the said business. Further the purported documents showing use in connection with the publishing business is provided for a very short period of a few months, whereas the Respondent has held the disputed domain name for nearly fourteen years.
As rightly mentioned by the Complainant, no information or evidence about the nature of the Respondent’s business has been provided in these proceedings. The Respondent does not mentioned what type of publishing business it runs, whether it is publishing books or does some kind of online publishing. Nor has the Respondent provided any other evidence that may prove the existence of a bona fide business such as yearly accounts or a statement of turnover, the names of books or journals published by the Respondent. For the reasons discussed, the Panel finds that the Respondent has not established that it uses the disputed domain name in connection with a bona fide offering of goods and services.
…
For the reasons discussed the Panel is satisfied that the Complainant has made a prima facie case that the Respondent has no rights and legitimate interests in the disputed domain name as required under the second element of paragraph 4(a) of the Policy.
Obviously, to properly defend a UDRP complaint such as this, one would need to have a reasonable and plausible ability to deny knowledge of the claimed right, point to the existence of other business using the same acronym like, oh, I don’t know,
or 
,
and show some legitimate business rights to the domain name. Here, because the Respondent apparently lives in the same town where the Complainant is prominent, there’s no plausible deniability. And because the Respondent just sat on the domain for fourteen years, and then apparently tried to create a (potentially fake/false) publishing business to defend against a threatened UDRP complaint, there’s just no way for the Respondent to succeed here.
And, of course, this didn’t help their case much either:
The Panel also notes the record shows there has been cyber-flight when the complaint was filed, the address and telephone details provided by the first Respondent appear to be false and spurious, Further, as argued by the Complainant, the Respondent is silent about why the search for the Respondent’s name diverts Internet users to the website of its rival political party. The Panel draws adverse inference from all these factors in addition to the other facts and circumstances showing bad faith registration and use of the disputed domain name.
In the end, this seems like a well-reasoned decision. Of course it aroused a lot of ire in the domainer-sphere, but I don’t think there’s anything here that’s poorly argued by the panelist, at least based on the facts that we’re given. Essentially, there was a large amount of evidence of bad faith, and very little to support their contention of rights or legitimate interests, so they lost. End of story.
Tagged bad faith registration and use, common law trademarks, evidence, gtld, rights or legitimate interests, transferred, WIPO