Legal News

The Gong Show was a television talent show on ABC in the late 1970s. Contestants would perform a variety of acts while being judged by a panel of celebrity guests. If a judge found an act particularly bad, they could hit a large gong, abruptly ending the performance.

It’s too bad there isn’t a gigantic gong at the World Intellectual Property Organization! A UDRP was filed against Gong.com at WIPO. It is case #D2025-0500. Without doing much research, I think this UDRP should be a case of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH).

First and foremost, “gong” is a descriptive term. A gong is a large, flat, circular percussion instrument, typically made of metal, that produces a loud sound when struck with a mallet. That, alone, in my opinion, should be enough to doom this UDRP. However, there is more…

Artificial Intelligence can be a time saver. For domain investors, it can make it easier and quicker to create marketing copy to help promote a domain name. Over the last couple of years, domain name sales platforms and domain investors have utilized AI tools to help generate sales copy for their domain names. This can be risky, as attorney John Berryhill noted on X today regarding some Atom.com landing pages he found:

The hazards of AI-generated domain landers… @atomHQ Anyone want to guess why this name would be associated with bricks or “building something”? pic.twitter.com/ACvcWO03cR

— John Berryhill (@Berryhillj) November 29, 2024

When I have a legal question regarding domain names, I usually discuss it with attorney John Berryhill. My feeling is that I would rather pay for John’s legal expertise than to wing it. The domain industry is fortunate that John regularly offers insights and wisdom on public venues like Namepros and X at no cost.

Yesterday morning, a Namepros member asked a question about sending outbound emails to sell a one word .io domain name. Doing outbound marketing to prospective buyers can be risky, particularly when there is limited usage for the term that makes up the domain name. Quite a few factors can make outbound marketing efforts more risky than others, and understanding the risks and how to mitigate them is important.

A UDRP was filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) against the valuable 2 letter QW.com domain name. The complaint was a bit confusing, pitting the Complainant, Quickware, Inc. / Williams Fred, against Quickware, represented by Fred Williams, as the Respondent.

The sole panelist, Scott Blackmer, ruled in favor of the domain registrant in this UDRP. The decision was published on the WIPO website this morning. Based on my reading of the decision, it appears that someone impersonated the domain registrant in an attempt to wrest control over this high value domain name using the fairly inexpensive UDRP:

In general, I thought UDRP panels have gotten past the issue of pricing as it relates to generic / descriptive one word domain names. A domain registrant who owns a one word .com – or alternative extension – domain name that is descriptive in nature should be able to make their own determination about the pricing based on their own expectations.

I am sure most of you have heard of the sportswear and shoe company called Converse. My daughter has a pair of the canvas Converse Chuck Taylor shoes, as do millions of others around the world. Converse is a well-known brand.

However, converse is also a dictionary term related to being engaged in conversation. With chat technology and chatbots in the news of late due to advancements in artificial intelligence, conversation related keywords are probably worth more now than ever before. In addition, I have been seeing startups and other businesses using non .com domain names quite a bit, and they seem to be selling for more. For instance, Doron Vermaat reported the $52,000 sale of Fire.CO just 3 days ago.