Case Number: D2019-0625
Complainant: Limited Liability Company AV 808
Represented by: House counsel
A St. Petersburg, Russia-based company, Limited Liability Company AV 808, has been found guilty of attempted reverse domain name hijacking in its effort to use the UDRP process to acquire the domain carcam.com. The respondent was EarthCam, Inc., the owner of a well-established live video-sharing platform, earthcam.com, which has owned carcam.com since July 22, 1996.
EarthCam, Inc. was represented by Michael J. Brown office, while LLC AV 808 was represented by house counsel.
While LLC AV 808 does own international trademarks for CARCAM, as well as the domain carcam.ru, the trademark is only six years old, while the corresponding domain has only been registered since 2010.
The sole panelist, Marilena Comanescu, of the World Intellectual Property Organization, noted EarthCam, Inc. registered carcam.com a full decade before the existence of LLC AV 808, making foreknowledge of a non-existent trademark an impossibility. “In the present matter, there are 17 years between the registration of the disputed domain name and the registration of the Complainant’s trademark, the Complainant in fact was founded more than 10 years after the registration of the disputed domain name,” Comanescu wrote.
“The Complainant should have appreciated that establishing registration and use in bad faith … was likely to involve difficult considerations,” she continued.
The ruling was handed up May 7, 2019.
Source: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/text.jsp?case=D2019-0625