In an unsurprising UDRP decision, the Bloomberg.Market domain name has been awarded to Bloomberg Finance. As you may recall, a website was set up on Bloomberg.Market to look like the actual Bloomberg website and an unfounded news report was published. The result was a giant temporary fluctuation in the price of Twitter stock.
The UDRP decision was published by the World Intellectual Property Organization, and it can be found on the UDRPSearch.com website. There was one panelist presiding over this UDRP decision, and not surprisingly, the respondent did not issue a response to the complaint.
You can read the entire UDRP decision for yourself if you would like, but here are a couple of interesting tidbits I found:
Next, Complainant argues that Respondent’s
domain name incorporates the BLOOMBERG mark fully and merely adds the gTLD “.market” suffix, rendering the name confusingly similar to the mark. Panels have agreed that adding a gTLD to a fully incorporated mark does nothing to reduce confusing similarity.
Respondent allegedly used the disputed domain name to post a fake report that manipulated the value of stock in a third-party entity. See Compl., at Attached Ex. G (purportedly fake article entitled “Twitter Attracts Suitors”); see also Compl., at Attached Exs. H and K (media attention surrounding Respondent’s presumably fake article). Panels have found that fraudulent misrepresentations intended to confuse Internet users and to commercially gain for oneself as constituting neither a bona fide offering of goods or services, nor a legitimate noncommercial or fair use.
It remains to be seen if Bloomberg, Twitter, stock investors, or any other entities will file suit against the registrant of the domain name for the way in which it was used. If I see anything about that, I will share it. Bloomberg seems to have learned its lesson, and it looks like the company is being proactive about domain registrations in the new gTLD extensions.
