A UDRP was filed against the valuable three letter .com domain name, OST.com. The UDRP was filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization, and it is listed as Case Details for WIPO Case D2018-0418.
OST.com is a 20 year old domain name, having been created in 1997. For many years, OST.com had been owned by an Arizona company. In January of this year, the Whois record for this domain name went under Whois privacy. As a result, the ownership of OST.com is unclear to me.
When I visited OST.com just now, I was forwarded to SimpleToken.org, which looks like an informational page about an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). On the top of the page, it says “$OST Invests in Unsplash — to Create the new Currency for Photography. Learn more.” Clicking the learn more link takes visitors to an article on Medium.com. It appears that OST is the symbol for Simple Token. If you visit CoinMarketCap.com, you can see that Simple Token has a market cap of more than $76 million. In addition, the website references the OST symbol.
The complainant in this UDRP is a company called Open Systems Technologies, DE LLC. A Google search for that name brings shows me that the company that most likely filed the UDRP (since there is more than one company with that name) uses the OSTUSA.com domain name. The company’s logo has “OST” in it, so I presume they go by “OST” and it is obvious why they would want this valuable domain name.
To prove its case, the complainant will need to show that the domain owner registered and is using this LLL.com domain name in bad faith. Assuming the OST.com domain name was acquired by the operators of Simple Token, it seems pretty clear that it was acquired because the token’s symbol is OST and it has nothing to do with the other company. From my (non-legal) vantagepoint, I don’t see how the complainant is going to be able to prove all three elements required under the UDRP.
Update: The UDRP was terminated and it looks like the registrant is keeping it.
