The UDRP Blog™

In LEGO Juris A/S v. Whoisguard Protected, Whoisguard, Inc. / Giovanni Bonny , WIPO Case No. D2017-0143 (Peter Wild, March 15, 2017), the Panel ordered the transfer of chineselego.com to the owner of the famous LEGO trademark. This was a case I could not resist blogging about, as my life just changed for the better this past week when my son wandered into a LEGO store at a local mall. He thought he was forcing me to buy LEGO bricks, but I may have been more excited about his "discovery" than he was. And I am glad to see that my money-for-bricks is being used to quash counterfeit enterprises. Well done LEGO! Reading this decision was almost as enjoyable as building my son's first LEGO kit. There is some great language in the decision for brand owners. To start, the Panel noted the significance of the fact that Complainant not only owns the LEGO mark and corresponding lego.com domain, but also owns "a large number of similar domain names." It is always wise to...

  In Jazz Basketball Investors, Inc. v. WhoisguardProtected,Whoisguard, Inc. / Big Shen, Joan Bristol , WIPO Case No. D2017-0031 (Desmond J. Ryan, March 8, 2017), the Panel ordered the transfer of jazzbasketballteamshop.com to Complainant, the owner of the Utah Jazz professional basketball team. It was a fairly straightforward case where Respondent had about as much chance of retaining the domain name as the Washington Generals had of beating the Harlem Globetrotters through history (random basketball history fact: the Generals only won once against the Globetrotters, due to an accidental time clock error, after losing 2,495 straight games). For this reason, Respondent didn’t even show up for the game (it defaulted). Complainant swooshed a three pointer in this one, satisfying all three factors necessary to prevail in a UDRP complaint. First, it easily demonstrated that the disputed domain name was confusingly similar to a trademark in which Complainant had ...