Legal News

According to NameBio, Panet.com was acquired for $5,752 via auction at DropCatch.com in September of 2020. A company that operates on a Panet ccTLD filed a UDRP against the domain name at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the single member panel ruled in favor of the complainant. You should have a look at the published decision in its entirety to understand the facts of the case.

Notably, it appears the domain registrant could have sold the domain name to the complainant for $35,000. Here’s an excerpt about that from the decision:

This afternoon, security researcher and blogger Brian Krebs shared a link to a Robinhood corporate blog post disclosing a “security incident:”

Investment platform Robinhood says a security incident led to the theft of email addresses for ~5 million customers. It’s safe to expect an uptick in phishing schemes targeting Robinhood users. https://t.co/imYNlRIXXX

— briankrebs (@briankrebs) November 8, 2021

As a result of the incident, around 5 million Robinhood customer email addresses were stolen. Krebs suggested that there will be “an uptick in phishing schemes targeting Robinhood users.”

In July of this year, Domain Gang published an article about Tilt.com. The domain name had been owned by Airbnb and was reportedly stolen from the company when the Whois registrant email domain name was acquired by a third party. Tilt.com was then registered to Greenberg & Lieberman, an Intellectual Property law firm and domain name escrow service provider.

Airbnb filed a UDRP at the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) in an attempt to recover the domain name. The decision was published this morning, and the single member panel ruled against Airbnb. The panelist found that the domain name was likely stolen but the complainant was unable to prove that the domain name was registered in bad faith given the current registrant. In order to have won the UDRP, Airbnb would have needed to prove the domain name was registered and being used in bad faith.

Here’s an excerpt from the decision:

The Empower.com lawsuit is important for reasons that go beyond a single domain name. In this litigation, you have a company that used Empower in its branding long before the Plaintiff’s Empower brand existed. Despite the history of the Empower.com domain name, the Plaintiff filed a cybersquatting lawsuit to wrest control of the valuable one word .com domain name from the longtime registrant, Empower Geographics.

I believe a victory by the Plaintiff in this litigation could pose significant harm to the domain name aftermarket. In my opinion, it would become more risky to own valuable one word or short acronym domain names if a company would be able to use the legal system to get control of a domain name that has been rightfully owned by another entity for years before that brand was even created.

In a blog post published yesterday afternoon, Coinbase announced that it would soon launch Coinbase NFT. According to the article Coinbase NFT will become “a peer-to-peer marketplace that will make minting, purchasing, showcasing, and discovering NFTs easier than ever.”

My guess is that Coinbase NFT will be found within the original Coinbase.com website, but the company also owns CoinbaseNFT.com. Whois records at DomainTools show that CoinbaseNFT.com is registered at MarkMonitor, and the domain name was created in March of this year.