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Congratulations to the IOC on This Massive UDRP Win

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is a somewhat frequent UDRP filer. The organization, which manages the Olympic Games, has filed dozens of UDRP proceedings, according to UDRPSearch.com. I took a quick look at the domain names that were subject of these UDRP filings, and none of them are as huge as the one that was just won.

The IOC filed a UDRP at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for the olympic-ioco-wso-wsmaf-wmaf-imac-wimaf-wmmaf-gmmaf-wfff.org domain name. The decision was just published, and not surprisingly, the IOC prevailed in the dispute and will become the new registrant of this 55 character .org domain name.

UDRP Record Set at WIPO

An inglorious record has been set at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2021, and we still have nearly two months remaining in the year. From what I can see on the WIPO case filing page, it appears that more UDRP cases have been filed this year than in any prior year.

WIPO UDRP cases are listed by the year in which they were filed. The case numbers are in numeric order, and a link to each set of cases contains 200 UDRP filings. 2020 was the first year the case numbers reached the 3400 – 3599 set of UDRPs. In 2020, the highest case number was D2020-3561, which indicates that 3,561 (gTLD) UDRP cases were filed in that year.

Facebook Files Lawsuit Against Namecheap (Updated)

According to a blog post on Facebook’s corporate blog, the social network company filed a lawsuit against Namecheap. The suit was filed because there were domain names registered at Namecheap under Whois privacy proxy that allegedly infringed on Facebook’s trademarks. The blog post was written by Christen Dubois, Director and Associate General Counsel, IP Litigation at Facebook.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog post outlining the lawsuit:

Buying Stadia (or Other New TM) Domains Makes No Sense to Me

This week, Google announced a new gaming platform called Stadia. As I observed shortly after the news was announced, Google smartly acquired the brand match Stadia.com domain name in advance of the announcement. I did not notice other Stadia-related domain names registered by Google at the time I wrote my article, but the company appears to have registered many domain names in ccTLD and new gTLD extensions in the hours and days since. Ten of the Stadia domain names registered by Google (via DNStination Inc.) include:

Nearly 4,000 Pokemon Domain Names Registered

According to Verisign’s DomainView Tool, nearly 4,000 .com and .net domain names have been registered with the Pokemon trademark in them during the past 7 days. This includes 421 .net domain names and 3,447 .com domain names. I am sure there have been hundreds or possibly thousands of other Pokemon-related domain names registered in ccTLDs and new gTLD domain names during the same time period.

Although some of these domain names may potentially be used legitimately, many of them are risky to own. I think Nintendo could file UDRP proceedings or potentially file a massive cybersquatting lawsuit if they wished. I have no idea what the company’s tolerance level is for domain names with their trademarks, but I think it is very risky for people to buy domain names with trademarks like this. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer of course.

I am always looking to buy domain names and have a

Warning: Pokemon is a Trademark

Whenever there is something viral or trending, it seems that people register a ton of domain names to try and capitalize on the trend or participate in it in a unique way.

If you’ve been watching the news for the last few days (or are into gaming), you’ve probably heard about Pokemon Go. If you haven’t, CNN published an article about it yesterday.

As with other trends, it seems that people are trying

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