MYS.com Subject of UDRP at WIPO

A UDRP was filed against the high value MYS.com domain name at the World Intellectual Property Organization. The UDRP was filed at WIPO within the last week or so, and it is WIPO Case D2020-1004.

The MYS.com domain name was created in November of 1996, making it 23 years old. The domain name is registered to a Chinese domain registrant. It looks like it has been owned by that registrant for several years. Before that, MYS.com had been owned by a US-based domain investor for quite some time.

The complainant in the UDRP is a company called Map Your Show, LLC. Using LinkedIn, I can see that company owns its brand match MapYourShow.com domain name. It does utilize its MYS initials in its logo. There are many US trademark filings for “MYS,” according to Trademarkia. There are also a whole lot of companies listed in LinkedIn called MYS, and I am sure there are many more that have MYS as an acronym.

The MYS.com landing page is in Chinese, but it appears to list the contact information for the domain registrant. I do not see anything that would infringe on the complainant’s brand or appear to target the complainant’s brand.

Three letter .com domain names regularly sell for five or six figures, as documented by this list of public three letter .com domain name sales. As I mentioned in my articles about the PRU.com UDRP and the Gen.com UDRP, data from UDRP.Tools shows that almost all recent UDRPs filed against LLL.com domain names have ended with the domain registrant winning and retaining their domain name. Many of these proceedings have ended with a Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH) finding.

To win the dispute, the complainant will need to show the domain name is confusingly similar to its brand and also prove the domain name was registered and is being used in bad faith. Unless I am missing something, I do not see anything obvious that would give the complainant an upper hand. I will keep an eye out for this decision.