A UDRP URS has been filed against the three letter Laz.org domain name at the National Arbitration Forum (NAF). The UDRP URS was filed last week, and it is case #1887839. Because the UDRP URS was filed at the NAF, the complainant in this UDRP URS will not become publicly known until the decision is published.
LAZ.org was created nearly 20 years ago, in April of 2001. According to current Whois records, the domain name is owned by NameFind, the domain name portfolio company owned and operated by GoDaddy. At the present time, Laz.org is parked with pay per clicks, and it has the standard for sale notice on the top of the landing page like hundreds of thousands of other NameFind names. From what I can tell based on historical Whois records at DomainTools, I believe the domain name was acquired by GoDaddy / NameFind in October of 2017 as a part of this portfolio acquisition.
I know a couple of people whose (different) last names begin with “Laz” and are commonly known by others as “Laz.” If I know two people called Laz, there are probably a ton of other people whose friends and associates refer to them as Laz. In addition, a Google search of “Laz” shows a whole lot of companies who use LAZ as their initials or are known as LAZ or Laz.
Without knowing the complainant right now, I am unable to see or understand why it thinks it has the right to the generic LAZ.org domain name without having to pay market value. For what it is worth, I can see that GoDaddy has the domain name priced at $24,999:
In order to win a UDRP URS, the complainant will need to prove that the domain name not only infringes on its mark(s), but also that the registrant registered and is using the domain name in a bad faith manner. Considering that GoDaddy / NameFind currently have and have sold thousands of 2, 3, and 4 letter acronym domain names, as well as the fact that it was bought in a portfolio acquisition, I think it will be very difficult to prove that GoDaddy bought the domain name in bad faith.
I will keep an eye on the UDRP URS proceeding to see what happens.
Update: As mentioned in a comment below, this was a URS filing rather than a UDRP filing.
Update 2: Claim was denied. Complainant was Central Florida Educational Foundation, Inc.
This is what happens when you own a valuable massive portfolio. Good thing for them they have a lot of lawyers, bad thing is their stock is down 25% this week.
I guess someone is not feeling the love of the new logo.
ummmm. The LAZ.Org landing page is full of ads for airport transportation. (see LAZParking.com) This might not be a slamdunk win for GoDaddy.
Good observation. Wonder how a panelist will look at it as transportation vs parking.
Looking at USPTO, there is only 1 active TM for laz. Didn’t check global. (there are TMs for laz parking)
Going to laz,org – I do not see anything about laz parking. We all know how ppc functions, maybe you were searching for parking or transportation.
It was filed as a URS instead of a UDRP which means that the Complainant doesn’t get the domain and has no desire to own/operate it.
But even if the Complainant wins, it will likely get re-registered by someone else after it expires.
URS and UDRP Cancelation proceedings don’t make a lot of sense for any domain of value.
For example, look at what happened to Skechers.shop:
https://www.udrpsearch.com/search?query=skechers.shop&search=domain
They filed it as a URS in 2016, and then after it was re-registered, they filed it as a UDRP.
Looks like they realized that the URS is generally a wasteful process.
Thank you for the correction. I did not notice that but will update the article to reflect.
Peculiar.