Case Number: D2020-1156
Complainant: Philip Savino
Represented by: Howard M. Cohn and Associates
A man named Philip Savino, represented by a law firm in Ohio, and purporting to represent a Wyoming-based company owning the trademark “access spa”, has been found guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking in his attempt to steal the domain, accessspa.com, from a Hong Kong-based domain reseller, Cykon Technology Limited. The UDRP complaint was filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization on May 7, 2020.
In a remarkably short UDRP ruling, which did not include a section outlining the parties’ contentions, the sole panelist, Warwick A. Rothnie, wrote that the registration of the trademark, which is only January of this year, 2020, is long after the original registration date of the domain, which is 2009.
In a succinct, two sentence paragraph, Mr. Rothnie summed up the case as well as his decision to rule Reverse Domain Name Hijacking. “In the present case … the long period of several years between the registration of the disputed domain name and subsequent commencement of use of the trademark by the Complainant (and even longer period before registration of the Trademark) should have made it very clear that the Complaint could not succeed,” he wrote. “On the record in this case, the Complaint should never have been filed.”
The RDNH ruling was handed up June 26, 2020, less than two months after the UDRP was filed.
Source: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/text.jsp?case=D2020-1156