UDRP Record Set at WIPO

An inglorious record has been set at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2021, and we still have nearly two months remaining in the year. From what I can see on the WIPO case filing page, it appears that more UDRP cases have been filed this year than in any prior year.

WIPO UDRP cases are listed by the year in which they were filed. The case numbers are in numeric order, and a link to each set of cases contains 200 UDRP filings. 2020 was the first year the case numbers reached the 3400 – 3599 set of UDRPs. In 2020, the highest case number was D2020-3561, which indicates that 3,561 (gTLD) UDRP cases were filed in that year.

This year, WIPO has already hit the 3600 – 3799 filing folder. The most recent case filing was D2021-3690, a UDRP involving three domain names: fashionnova.ec, fashionnova.gt, and fashionnova.shop. This indicates there have been 3,690 UDRP filings made at WIPO. Of course, this does not count UDRPs filed at other providers like the National Arbitration Forum or the Czech Arbitration Court.

It is unclear how many domain names have been subject to UDRP filings this year. A UDRP filing may contain more than one domain name if the registrant is the same for all domain names in the filing. There are likely well over 10,000 domain names that have been subject of UDRP proceedings at WIPO this year.

It must be noted that although there are some UDRP filings involving valuable generic domain names such as three letter or one word .com domain names, the vast majority of UDRP filings involve clear cases of cybersquatting.