The tech company searched for a valuable domain registered in 1995.
A California company tried to reverse the hijacking of the domain name jtt.com, a panel from the World Intellectual Property Organization has found (pdf).
Thorpe Technologies, Inc. sued Gregory Kudasz.
Kudasz registered the domain in 1995, the same year he registered a DBA with the initials JTT.
Thorpe Technologies uses the domain name thorpetech.com. For a long time, he used a stylized logo that looks a bit like “jtt”. If that’s what it’s supposed to be, it’s unclear what the J stands before the initials of Thorpe Technologies. He filed a trademark application for the design mark a few weeks before filing the UDRP.
The tech company recently discovered jtt.com was listed for sale for $57,500. It doesn’t matter that it seems like a good price for this domain. In its UDRP filing, Complainant stated:
Since the Respondent has owned the domain name JTT.COM for several years, it demands an exorbitant amount of money for the domain name, but there is no evidence that the Respondent has any legitimate rights or interests in the domain name. respect to the domain name… the Defendant’s registration and use of the domain name JTT.COM was clearly in bad faith.
Panelist Scott Blackmer disagreed. He concluded that Thorpe Technologies had not demonstrated that the respondent had no rights or legitimate interests in the domain, nor that it had been registered and used in bad faith.
Finding the reverse domain name hijacking, Blackmer wrote:
Here the complaint is manifestly deficient. The complainant is not a large company and operates in a niche market selling to industrial customers. Respondent registered the three-letter domain name 26 years ago, less than a year after plaintiff said it began using its unregistered design logo. It should have been clear that the Complainant had to establish that its logo had rapidly acquired a distinctive character to serve as a mark of common law and also of national notoriety, and that the Respondent most likely intended to attack this mark in 1996. But the Complaint makes no serious effort to resolve these issues. The Complainant insists that the Respondent is offering the Domain Name for a large sum of money, but this is not a surprise given that it is a three-way “.com” domain name. letters. A UDRP complainant cannot simply ignore the question of whether there were trademark rights at the time of the domain name.
recording and whether it was likely that the defendant intended to exploit them.The Panel finds that Complainant brought the Complaint in bad faith, within the meaning of Rule 15(e), in an attempt to Reverse Domain Name Hijacking,
Churovich Law, LLC represented the plaintiff. The Respondent represented himself.
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