Case Number: D2020-0591
Complainant: Schoffstall Farm, LLC
Represented by: Tucker Arensberg, P.C.
A Pennsylvania winery, Schoffstall Farm, LLC, has been found guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking after attempting to use the UDRP process to obtain the domain name, springgate.com, from its current owner, whois listed as privacy protected, but who has owned the domain since 2006.
Schoffstall Farm, represented by the law firm of Tucker Arensberg, P.C., argued it had invested considerable sums in the branding of “springgate” for wine, cider, beer and general promotional merchandise, including t-shirts, hats and bottles, dating those branding and promotional sums to 2014. The complainant also submitted two trademarks it owns for the marks “spring gate” and “springgate”. A trademark registration for the former was granded in October of 2017, but the exact-match trademark was only registered in January of this year, 2020. Schoffstall Farm also attempted to claim the domain owner only registered the domain in 2018.
The domain owner, who hired attorney John Berryhill, Esq., argued there was no way the domain name could be registered in bad faith, when the domain registration predates the existence of the company by several years, and the trademarks, themselves, by more than a decade. Furthermore, Mr. Berryhill noted the evidence provided by the complainant to support a 2018 registration date was easily explained by a mere merger-acquisition situation at the domain registrar.
The attempt to use misleading evidence was not lost on the three-member panel, although they stopped short of calling the effort a direct attempt. Nonetheless, the evidence question, as well as the domain’s age, both conspired against the complainant.
“The Complainant produced no material evidence that the Respondent acquired the disputed domain name in 2018 and gave no reasonable explanation for its assertion to that effect,” the panelists wrote. “The Panel is particularly perturbed by the Complainant’s failure to exhibit the Respondent’s email dated November 28, 2019, stating that it had acquired the disputed domain name in 2006, having exhibited its own letter of the previous date and having been expressly requested by the Respondent to include its reply.”
The RDNH ruling was handed up May 14, 2020.
Added October 5, 2020.
Source: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/text.jsp?case=D2020-0591