Legal News

In one of the final UDRP filings of 2016, legendary baseball player Curt Schilling has filed a UDRP against the CurtSchilling.com domain name. The UDRP was filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization, and it is WIPO case #D2016-2642.

CurtSchilling.com has a creation date of October 22, 2012. Based on this creation date, my guess is the domain name was acquired via drop auction (or drop catching service) since the domain name had been previously registered. I do not see a public sale record for this domain name at NameBio, so that is a guess and I am unsure of the purchase price. At the time of publication, CurtSchilling.com forwards to SnackSmarter.com, which has a “coming soon” landing page with contact information on it.

For those who aren’t familiar with Curt Schilling, he is

A UDRP has been filed against Gstaad.com at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The case is WIPO Case D2016-2601.

Gstaad is an area of Switzerland known for its world class skiing. You can read more about Gstaad in this Ski.com write-up. The Gstaad.com domain name has a creation date of October 31, 1995, making over 20 years old. The domain name appears to be registered to a registrant in Monte Carlo, and the domain name currently forwards to a website found at 3780gstaad.com.

According to NameBio, Gstaad.com  sold for $31,250 at auction via SnapNames back in 2006. For  an unknown reason, it is not listed in the DNJournal sales report for 2006, but had it been, it would have been in the top 25 public sales for the year.

The complainant in this UDRP is listed as

Last month, I reported that there appeared to be  more gTLD UDRP cases filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2016 than in 2015. At the time of my article, the highest case # (case filings are in numeric order) was WIPO Case D2016-2392. In my article, I predicted that this year will have the most gTLD UDRP case filings at WIPO than any other year, and it looks like that prediction came  true.

Although it wasn’t exactly a difficult prediction to make based on the rate of filings, it looks like there are now more cases filed in 2016 than there were in 2012, which appears to have had the most filings. In 2012, the highest case number was  D2012-2549. As of this morning, the current case # for 2016 is  D2016-2560, a UDRP filed by Philip Morris USA Inc. against the Marlboro.Press domain name. Unfortunately for Philip Morris, the company is all too familiar with UDRP proceedings  (the company seems to have a tremendous win record though).

I believe the number of UDRP filings at WIPO this year is so high because of

A UDRP was filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) against the generic, 20 year old Reformation.com domain name. The UDRP is WIPO Case D2016-2549.

Reformation.com has a creation date of May 31, 1996, making this domain name 20 years old.  The domain name was privately registered for quite some time, but it came out of privacy in 2014. It looks like the domain name is being used for a website to document news reports of sexual abuse involving ministers.

I looked through Archive.org to see how the domain name was previously used. The first entry was from October of 2002, and it looks like the content on the homepage is very similar to what is being displayed now. Further, there is a hit counter on that entry that shows a start date of 1997. There are various entries between 2002 and 2016, including this, this, and this, and all of those entries show  a similar looking website. On the bottom left of the website it says, “UPDATED AS OF AUGUST 2003.” It would seem that