Legal News

Karen Bernstein is an Intellectual Property lawyer who has considerable domain industry expertise. Karen has been involved in the domain space for quite some time, and she is a regular participant at domain industry events.

According to a LinkedIn post she shared yesterday, Karen has been appointed as a UDRP panelist at the National Arbitration Forum.

A UDRP was filed against the Cabot.com domain name at NAF. There are more than 1,000 companies with Cabot in their branding listed on LinkedIn alone and there are 46,000 people results. That alone should indicate the wide usage of the Cabot term. The Cabot I am most familiar with is a cheese company, and it was not the complainant here.

The complainant in the UDRP is Cabot Brand Co. Ltd. Just looking at that alone, I wouldn’t know which Cabot company is filing the UDRP. The domain registrant did not respond to the UDRP. Despite this, the UDRP was denied.

When I saw a UDRP had been filed against PitStop.com by a company called Distribuidora Automotiva S.A., I spent a couple of minutes checking the Whois history at DomainTools. My non-legal conclusion was that this UDRP is DOA and it will result in a finding of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH).

The domain name was defended by attorney John Berryhill, and the three member UDRP panel ruled in favor of the registrant. This was not a surprise. PitStop.com is a descriptive domain name, with the “pit stop” phrase used by brands and used generically throughout the world. One entity should not have the right to control the .com domain name for a descriptive term, in my opinion.

A UDRP was filed against the RedFig.com domain name at the National Arbitration Forum (NAF). The complainant in the UDRP is a company called Redfig LLC, and the respondent is a domain investor who was represented by attorney John Berryhill. The decision was published this morning, and the registrant prevailed and will retain the domain name.

In its argument, the complainant tried to convince the panel the domain name was being used in bad faith because it was listed for sale for more than the registration cost of a domain name:

“Respondent registered and uses the domain name in bad faith. The Domain Name is listed for sale on a third-party site for a sum which is well in excess of the cost of purchasing a domain name from a registrar.”

That didn’t fly with the panel.