The credit card company Discover Financial Services, Inc.
filed a UDRP on the domain names DiscoverCards.com and DiscoverCredit.com.
Discover uses two main domain names to access it services and promote its credit cards Discover and its Discover It.
They own the domain name Discover.com, as well as the domain DiscoverCard.com
Discover is paying Google on a Pay Per Click basis to be on top of the term “Discover” and “Discover Card” and the site that is being advertised is DiscoverCard.com
It’s almost incomprehensible that the domain name DiscoverCards.com was registered in 2002 and the UDRP was just filed in July 2014.
That’s 12 years.
According to Screenshots.com the domain has been parked since at least 2004.
The domain has been owned under privacy at Fabulous since at least 2009.
Needless to say the domain must have gotten a ton of traffic over the years on very high paying terms, credit and credit cards.
I would guess someone made a lot of money off of this domain.
The question is how in the world would it take this company 12 years to file a UDRP on a bang on domain name DiscoverCards.com, correctly spelled and the plural of the site they are spending probably a lot of money advertising on Google.
It’s pretty amazing when so many trademark holders have been at ICANN for 5 + years worrying about what happens if someone registers a new gTLD like DiscoverCards.CEO, while allowing bang on domains like this one to exist without challenge for so many years
Discover Financial Services, Inc. is no stranger to UDRP’s, they have filed 20 over the years on over 100 domain names, including many typo’s.
They filed a UDRP last year on the domain names:
discoverthecard.net
dicoverard.com
dikscovercard.com
disc0vercard.com
disc9vercard.com
discaovercard.com
discobvercard.com
discocercard.com
discove4card.com
discovedrcard.com
discovercardc.com
discovercardcard.com
discovercardx.com
discovercared.com
discovercdard.com
discovercsard.com
discovercxard.com
discovertcard.com
discovfercard.com
discovwercard.com
to me as a non-us person who is not familiar with the credit card industry in America DiscoverCards.com is just as generic and descriptive and FindCards.com, ResearchCards.com, GoCards.com etc
so i find this UDRP questionable.
First, I like nobody’s comment. (Take that sentence out of context and it seems quite bizarre). One could argue the terms is highly generic, particularly if the domain had not been resolving anywhere or didn’t have ads to competing cards. Right now it forwards to a blank page at ww2.discovercredit.com.
Second, the competency level of people running the online marketing of these outfits is ridiculously low, given the prevailing ineptitude that permits this exact-match for the company’s card name to be registered by someone other than the company. This is as embarrassing as all those hotel chains losing out on hotels.com. Well, maybe not that bad, but close.
Third, while I know you are trying to be cute by using the phrase, “12 short years,” to underscore the fact it took a long time for Discover Card to file this UDRP, might I remind you, Michael, that in the timescale of the Universe, 12 years is not even a blink of an eye. So there.
🙂
if the company wold have a clear exclusive meaning like Amex, so the Amexcards.com is a big no-no and i would justify such a udrp if the domain had been AMEXcards.com or VISAcards.com but discovercards.com is a verb+noun descriptive .com domain.
That is not the issue in the post whether Discover will or will not win the UDRP.
The issue is that it took them 12 years to file a UDRP on this domain which they filed at least 20 UDRP’s on what I consider to be much less value domains
finishing the argumentation,
Discover as company can trademark “Discover” for use in credit cards market and can prohibit use of the term when it deals with Discover only creditcards, but the use of “cards” as a words is generic and deals with cards, so you cannot prohbit other people from using “cards” in descriptive use,
finally verb ‘discover’ used in its descriptive dictionary nature in conjunction with noun “cards” can be used in “cards” related markets BUT there must be no brand from the company called “Discover” to avoid confusion with the card brand “discover”.
so if the domain DissoverCards.com is used to advertise cards but does not contrain Discover brands there then it is used legitimately and common sense prevails.
but that’s common sense and simple trademark analysis not sure if this works well now in the BS BRAND TM world where every word is trademarked and almost nobody knows even the trademark holder what the trademark actually means.
this udrp is just as though if company Nice existed and made autos that it could go after Nicecars.com and win.
well, it actually happened and the domain was seized in a similar udrp.
Well, Mike from the title of the article it can be seen that it’s quite no big deal that a descriptive ‘cards’ domain is being attempted to be taken via UDRP? just the timing?
if it was not offered for sale to the company that’s RDNH no better than “Nicecars.com” thing.