SNCF Voyageurs, the French national railway company, operates a public transport service in France called TER (Transport express régional). The company filed a UDRP against the valuable TER.com domain name at the World Intellectual Property Organization. The decision was published today, and the UDRP was denied.

While it almost always seems that a complainant in a 3 letter .com UDRP is overreaching to nab a valuable asset via legal means rather than purchasing it, I thought the complainant may have had a puncher’s chance of winning this case. From my vantage point, the biggest issue for the domain registrant was the existence of pay per click (PPC) links related to the complainant. Here’s what the complainant reported:

A UDRP was filed against the Electrosoft.com domain name at the National Arbitration Forum (NAF). The single member panel ruled against the complainant and found that the case was brought in bad faith. In fact, I do not recall reading a decision with a more extensive discussion about why the panelist decided this was a case of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking.

The complainant in this UDRP is a company called Electrosoft Services, Inc. It seems the company was internally represented until it brought in outside counsel to file a supplemental submission to try and prevent a RDNH finding. The domain name has long been owned by a domain investment firm who was represented by attorneys Brett E. Lewis and Michael Cilento of Lewis & Lin, LLC. The panelist was Jeffrey J. Neuman.

A UDRP was recently filed against the valuable Tips.com domain name at the National Arbitration Forum (NAF). The decision was just published, and the three member panel ruled in favor of the domain registrant who will retain the domain name. The registrant was represented by attorney Zak Muscovitch.

A quick glance at the UDRP might make an investor think this would be a slam dunk case for the domain registrant, but I don’t think that was the case. In fact, this is a prime example of the importance of hiring a good attorney for a UDRP defense.

When I was in college, it was a requirement for all members of fraternities to get alcohol training. Our college required us to all become “TIPS trained,” and the complainant reportedly has trademark rights to the TIPS term related to alcohol. In the complaint, the complainant cited this trademark and noted that the domain name reportedly had alcohol-related pay per click links on the landing page:

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: