Montres Charmex S.A., the maker of Swiss Military watches, has asked DomainStatute to recover the “swiss-military.com” domain name, originally registered by Ammann & Co. AG. The case was assigned to single-member Panel at the National Arbitration Forum. On September 2, 2007, the Panelist, Professor David E. Sorkin, ruled that “[h]aving established all three elements required under the ICANN Policy, the Panel concludes that relief shall be GRANTED.” Accordingly, the client will now be able to reflect its world famous brand in a corresponding domain name.
In a recent e-mail, Otto Franco notes that on January 5, 2007 CPR, one of the four ICANN-accredited dispute resolution providers authorized to decide UDRP complaints, gave notice to ICANN that effective January 12, 2007, it would no longer be accepting filings under the UDRP rules to resolve domain name disputes.
The message did not explain CPR’s reasons. But it’s worth noting that few complainants have chosen to file their cases with CPR. The likely reason is that CPR’s filing fees were considerably higher than those of the competition. For example, for a case involving 3-5 disputed domain names and heard before a single panelist, CPR charged complainants $2,500 - more than twice the amount charged by ADNDRC (another provider) for a comparable case ($1,200).
And speaking of ADNDRC, that has so far operated offices in Beijing and Hokg Kong, has began accepting cases in its Seoul office, too.
According to the Credit Union Information Security Professionals Association (CUISPA), a massive bulk registration of credit union-like domain names was performed by typosquatters recently. Over 450 domains that include the “FCU.com” and “creditunion.com” endings were registered.
The cybersquatter who made these registrations is Maltuzi Holdings, a company based in Mountain View, CA. Naturally, the CUISPA did try to contact Maltuzi Holdings, but there was no answer at the number provided by the company.
A few days ago John Zuccarini completed serving his jail sentence. According to the FBI, Zuccarini operated over 5,500 copycat Web sites. October 2001 was when he was first charged of typosquatting. Once a Web surfer inadventantly got to one his sites, they were hit with a virtually unstoppable flood of pop-up windows. Zuccarini’s prosecution was the first under the then-new Truth in Domain Names Act. On December of 2003 he pleaded guilty, and on February 2004 was subsequently sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.
Please refer to Waller’s column, linked above. It is worth noting that at least two of the aforementioned businesses have been involved in legal or administrative proceedings alleging domain name cybersquatting or typosquatting.
Numerous proceedings against Jucco Holdings have been initiated in several ICANN-accredited arbitration bodies such as WIPO and NAF.
Laporte Holdings has been sued six times in U.S. federal courts. The cases are:
UnitedHealth Group, Inc. v. Laporte Holdings, Inc. Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc. v. Laporte Holdings, Inc. Kellogg North America Co. v. Laporte Holdings, Inc. Dell, Inc. v. Nameking.Com Inc. Girl Scout Council of Greater St. Louis v. LaPorte Holdings, Inc. EarthLink, Inc. v. Nameking.com, Inc. et al
