Makers Of YPlan App Found Guilty Of Reverse Domain Name Highjacking on 14 Year Old Yplan.com

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YPlan, Inc. (“Complainant”), represented by Eugene Rome of Rome & Associates, A.P.C., of California, was just found guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH) on the domain name yplan.com by a one member UDRP panel of Antonina Pakharenko-Anderson

Talk about a slam dunk case.

The Complainant which says its the “creator of the well-known and famous application based or mobile app based service called YPLAN”, alleged its rights in the YPLAN mark date back to 2012 based on the registration of the word mark YPLAN in the United Kingdom, and in the US, however the company was not even formed until January 30, 2013.

The domain holder registered the domain name yplan.com back in 2001.

Duh.

“”In the present case, the domain name was registered in 2001. The earliest date of any registration or use of the mark relied upon in the Complaint was in 2012.

In view of this, the registration of the domain name could not have been in bad faith on any interpretation of the facts and cases cited in the Complaint.

Normally speaking, when a domain name is registered before a trademark right is established, the registration of the domain name was not in bad faith because the registrant could not have contemplated the complainant’s non-existent right.”

Furthermore, on this point the UDRP reflects a widely applied principle of trademark and other laws, that priority generally prevails.

Complainant should have realized that there was no way to prevail on this Complaint.

Under these circumstances, the Panel finds that the Complaint was brought in bad faith primarily to deprive a registered domain-name holder of a domain name and constitutes an abuse of the administrative proceeding.”

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. John says

    There really needs to be some kind of financial penalty for this type of nonsense-and a somewhat large number-$50,000 or so.

    • janedoe says

      Civil case, pursuit for damages/defamation of character with the “guilty of reverse domain name hijacking” as evidence along with any associated costs for defending against the actions of the guilty party.

      • DropWizard.com says

        @ Janedoe: At what cost again to the domain holder. Canada has a penalty written into the .ca of up to 5k. If you don’t pay you can’t own any .ca domains until you do. Not surprisingly we get very few cases like this.

        Udrp has needed a similiar automatic penalty since the beginning. But of course just because we PAY for the industry doesn’t mean we should get any consideration 🙁

  2. jose says

    there is an extreme simplicity in the analysis of this case that is not usual with UDRPs.

    it doesn’t matter when the domain was registered. a Complainant can steal a domain by proving that the domain has been registered (renewed) or used in bad faith after.

    in every renew the owner must be sure that it is not infringing on anyone’s trade mark. BS, but that’s the way it is set up.

  3. Josh says

    I always see these guys advertised on the London Underground & each time I wonder when they’ll cough up for the dot com.. Never it seems