I read something pretty surprising on CircleID this morning pertaining to the Wooot.com UDRP decision that has reportedly been revised after publication. I initially wrote about the decision because I found it strange that the domain name was canceled by the panelist, and Andrew followed-up with more questions about the decision. Domain investor and frequent domain watchdog, George Kirikos, wrote the Circle ID article.
According to Kirikos’ research (and documented in Andrew’s article), someone removed the following important sentence from the UDRP decision after it had been published: “Complainant held a trademark registration for “AOL” and Respondent registered the domain name “iaol.com.”‘
Kirikos explains that the reason this line is important was that “This was completely out of place and nonsensical, because the complainant was Woot, not AOL, and iaol.com was a reference to a completely different case in 2002. This was the original “smoking gun” that caused the public to dig further into other cases of “cut/paste” amongst panelists. An archive of the original decision (cached on April 22, 2010) was made at Webcitation.”
There also doesn’t appear that there is any explanation as to why this UDRP appears to have been revised post-publication nor does there appear to be any notice issued on the National Arbitration Forum website. It doesn’t seem right that a UDRP decision could be revised after it’s issued without any sort of explanation or notice, especially when this particular section of the UDRP is one of the things that made Kirikos identify the cut/paste UDRP problem in the first place.
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- “Are Geodomains Worth Less in Light of UDRP Decision?” Shortly after Mike Berkens posted his article about the Hayward.com...
- Why It’s Bad Not to Respond to UDRP A few days ago, Mike Berkens reported on the UDRP...
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