In May of this year, I wrote about the filing of a UDRP against the valuable Airy.com domain name. When I saw the filing, I did some cursory research, and I did not see anything that stood out to give the complainant a chance to win the UDRP. The decision was published today, and the panelist ruled the domain registrant could retain the domain name. The panelist also ruled this is a case of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH).
You can read the entire decision to see all of the reasons for why the complainant lost, but I want to highlight two aspects of the decision that stood out to me. The first is that Airy.com was reportedly acquired for $150,000 in 2017. This was supported by a wire transfer receipt to Uniregistar. This sale will now be archived by DNJournal, and it will tie for the 38th largest public domain name sale of 2017. I also added it to the Embrace.com one word .com sale list.
I also want to highlight a paragraph from the the RDNH discussion in the decision. The panel acknowledged the effort and cost to defend this domain name:
“The Panel concludes that this is a Complaint which was destined to fail and should never have been brought. In these circumstances, it is particularly regrettable that the Complainant’s actions have caused the Respondent to invest considerable time and resources in preparing and submitting a substantial Response at a time when, as it notes, it is also having to deal with the sudden detrimental effect of the current global pandemic upon its business.”
Even when a UDRP is filed that is fairly easy to defend, many domain registrants will still hire an attorney. In the case of Airy.com, the registrant paid $150,000 to buy the domain name it is using for its business, so there was even more incentive to hire counsel to defend the domain name.
On occasion, UDRP panels make a decision I disagree with, and this would have been a nightmare for the domain registrant. It was nice to see the panelist acknowledge what the domain registrant went through to defend its rightfully owned domain name. The panelist in this decision was Andrew D. S. Lothian.
It appears that what precipitated the UDRP filing was the continued and apparently unauthorized effort by the Uniregistry brokers to attempt to sell the domain name to the Complainant – even after the Complainant had threatened the domain registrant.
If you have received a legal threat on a domain name, and some chowderheaded idiot broker tries to sell that domain name to the person threatening you, that’s going to cost you.
It looks as if Uniregistry simply continued spamming buyers even after the respondent had bought the domain name.
Then, Uniregistry clammed up when their customer asked them about it:
“On May 22, 2020, the Respondent issued an email to the “Uniregistry Brokerage Team” to seek its confirmation as to whether it had continued to correspond with the Complainant regarding the disputed domain name after this had been sold to the Respondent. The Respondent indicated in its email that it had given no authority for such correspondence to be entered into on its behalf. According to the Respondent, no reply has been received to said email.”
Ok, John, but didn’t you help form/represent Uniregistry with Frank to begin with?
Seems odd that you would now refer to them as a bunch of “chowderheaded idiot brokers”, doesn’t it?
I spent part of my life working in IT. There is NO EXCUSE for what J. Berryhill mentioned above from an IT perspective, i.e. simply knowing that the domain is sold and should not be promoted anymore, especially not in 2020 or since many years ago to boot.
I once sold a pretty nice domain through Escrow, then told the Uni brokers that they don’t need to follow up on their old inquiries because the name is no longer available, even opened a support ticket to let them know. They did it anyway and I kept seeing their attempts in the Uni Market. At least twice a month they would fire out emails for a domain that wasn’t even for sale anymore. Bunch of rodeo clowns. That’s what happens when people are working solely on commission. Pay your guys a fixed and teach them some ethics for christ’s sake.
Wonder why GoDaddy decided to remove their logo from the Uni sales landing page.