A couple of days ago we wrote about several UDRP decisions all involving famous trademarks and or common typo’s of them and I blamed the trademark holder for the problem.

Today comes another UDRP decision that points out what I was talking about.

This case involved the domain names xboxfitness.com and xboxfitness.net

Here is part of the opinion of the one member panel that awarded the domains to Microsoft:

“”Complainant contends that it announced its newest motion controller for the XBOX at E3 2009 on June 1, 2009, and Respondent registered xboxfitness.com two days later, and registered <xboxfitness.net> another twelve days later.”

“Complainant asserts that Respondent’s use and registration of the disputed domain names after Complainant’s launch of its new XBOX controller demonstrates opportunistic bad faith.”

“The Panel finds that Respondent’s registration of the disputed domain names shortly after Complainant’s launch of its new product is evidence of bad faith under Policy ”

Sure correct decision but is it a win for Microsoft?

I would say no

Note the domains were registered in June 2009, this is January 2013, 3 1/2 years later.

The trademark holder probably spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $5K to bring this UDRP when it could have just registered the domains for less than $100 and had control over the domains for the last 3 1/2 years.

How on earth did Microsoft not register these domains before the announcement?

These are not typo’s or a variation of a product but the bang on product domain of the 1st and most popular “games” in the Xbox series.

How much money did Microsoft spend in advertising the Xbox and its fitness product over the last 3 1/2 years

Million and million, tens of million.

If trademark holders want to greatly reduce the cyber-squatting problem they need to do a little diligence on their end.