Back in August a company, Corporation Service Company (CSC), issued a press release, regarding statements made by Fairwind Partners a founding member of CADNA  about CSC business.

It seems that CSC has clients that own a lot of “Internet Gripe Sites”,   Domains that contain a brand name and the word “sucks” at the end.  According to CSC most of these domains are owned by the brand holders themselves and are defensive registrations.  There is one client of CSC which hold the rest of these domains but they do not resolve to a page.

According to CSC,  Fairwinds is “owned and operated by two ex-salespeople from our company”.

According to CSC, Fairwinds issued a whitepaper entitled “The Power of Internet Gripe Sites”, in which Fairwinds in CSC opinion attacked their character.

According to a source CSC has now filed suit against Fairwinds as a outgrowth of this situation.

We have no seen the suit nor can verify that it exist, but our source is 100% certain a suit has been filed.

We will keep you updated as we get more information.

While we take no pleasure in other people problems, if in fact the accusation of “trademark infringement” is thrown around loosely, as CADNA throws around terms such as “criminal misconduct” for things which are simply not criminal, someone should call them out on it, and that is a good step to stop the generalization that has taken place within the press releases of CADNA.

Here the part of the press release of CSC from back in August which indicated CSC unhappiness with Fairwinds:

“””””The whitepaper issued by Fairwinds, refers to a “trend” of CSC serving as a registrar for “brandsucks” domain names. This reference can be viewed as an attempt to discredit CSC by insinuating that although we purport to protect the rights of brand owners that there is also a so-called trend of us working on behalf of trademark infringers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The paper also states that “[u]pon finding this trend, FairWinds alerted CSC and at the time of this paper’s release has yet to receive a comment on the matter.” In fact, FairWinds did not inform us until the day the paper was released and when we responded that same day to make arrangements to provide our comments, we were told that it was too late. We are writing to you now to provide our response to FairWinds’ misleading assertions.

Other than names that are owned by the brand owners themselves for defensive purposes, all the “brandsucks” names that were attributed to CSC as registrar in the article are held in one account by a single customer. This one account was inherited from CSC’s acquisition of the Corporate Services Division of Register.com, and none of the “brandsucks” names owned by this customer resolve to a website. This customer has already transferred out from our management a significant number of names and we have requested that they transfer out the balance of their names. We also have taken similar action in the past against other inherited accounts engaged in the practice of registering names that infringe upon the rights of brand owners as we have become aware of them.

As the trusted partner for global domain name management of more than half of the owners of the 100 Best Global Brands, we take our responsibility to help our customers devise and implement strategies to protect their corporate identity online very seriously. Accordingly, we want to make it very clear that CSC does not condone the practice of registering names that infringe upon the trademark rights of brand owners and does not solicit business from anyone engaged in such practice.

We are disappointed by FairWinds Partners’ attempt to attack our credibility in what appears to be a self-serving effort to advance their agenda of charging brand owners significant fees for providing consulting services which we offer on a complimentary basis as part of our domain and brand protection services. We hope this note sets the record straight. The credibility CSC has earned serving corporations and law firms for more than 100 years is extremely important to us. If you should have any questions or would like to discuss this matter further, please do not hesitate to contact me directly.””””