$15B company loses UDRP case.
Juniper Networks has lost a domain name arbitration case to get the domain juniper.tv. Despite having a market cap of nearly $15 billion, the arbitrator noted that it’s entirely plausible that the registrant of the domain name hadn’t heard of the company because it’s a business-to-business company.
Also working against Juniper Networks is that juniper is a generic term. The registrant had registered other seemingly generic .tv domain names such as atmosphere.tv, lightbulb.tv, and regions.tv. (Of course the latter one is also the name of a bank, and the parked page at the domain currently shows banking ads.) The arbitration panelist wrote:
Here, the parking website formerly associated with the Domain Name was not focused on the Complainant’s or competing products, although both could be found through the layers of advertising links. The fact that ad server software would logically associate the Complainant (as well as other commercial enterprises) with the word “juniper” does not prove that the Respondent likely had the Complainant’s mark in contemplation when he registered the Domain Name, which is what would be required to establish bad faith in the registration and use of the Domain Name.
It would be easier to infer such an illicit intention if the Complainant’s mark were not comprised of dictionary words
Incidentally, Juniper Networks does not own Juniper.com, and instead uses Juniper.net as its main web address.
© DomainNameWire.com 2010.
Get Certified Parking Stats at DNW Certified Stats.
Related posts: