This panel made a thorough rebuttal to the Complainant’s arguments but didn’t consider reverse domain name hijacking.

Travel Designer India Private Limited, a company in India, has lost a UDRP it filed against a Canadian over the domain rez.live.

The Complainant uses the domain RezLive.com for its travel website. The Respondent owns a live broadcasting company called REZ Network Inc.

You can forgive the Complainant for not knowing about the Respondent’s business when it filed the dispute. The Respondent uses a subdomain of rez.live to provide some of its services, so it wasn’t clear what connection it had to the domain.

But it did an odd thing when the domain owner responded to the case. Instead of dropping it, the Complainant doubled down.

The three-person World Intellectual Property Organization panel denied the claims and made a point-by-point takedown of Travel Designer’s arguments. So kudos to panelists Andrew Lothian, Michele Bernasconi and Bereskin for that.

Still, I’m surprised the panel didn’t consider reverse domain name hijacking. It was abundantly clear shortly after filing the case that it wasn’t winnable, yet the Complainant pushed forward.

The Complainant also stated, “The Respondent has registered the disputed domain name in order to resell it and has no intention of making use of it for any purpose.” This is factually incorrect. There weren’t even pre-dispute negotiations between the parties.

I recommend reading the full decision.

The Complainant’s initial counsel withdrew due to a conflict and staffing issues due to Covid-19. The decision lists PANDA Law as counsel for the Complainant. Andrews Robichaud P.C. represented the domain owner.

Post link: A (mostly) thorough cybersquatting decision

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