Cybersquatting

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.

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.

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: