Both companies win complaints against bad-faith registration

Sep 7, 2009 08:09 GMT  ·  By

Media giant Disney and food-packager Nestle have won cases against different persons that registered domain names similar to their trademarks and used them in bad faith to acquire monetary profit. The domain names are to be transferred as soon as possible to the complainants.

Disney, the largest entertainment company in the world, filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum to change possession rights for five domain names that were registered after three of its trademarks: Little Mermaid, Hannah Montana and Mary Poppins.

The five domain names disputed were: marypoppinsonbroadway.com, marypoppinstickets.net, marypoppinstickets.org, hannahmontanaticketsonline.com, and littlemermaidticketsny.com.

The first two domain names didn't do that much harm, since they redirected to the official Disney on Broadway page, but the last three redirected to a page where products were being sold, illegally showing the Disney trademarks. Revenues were also being made from pay-per-click commercial ads. After analyzing the case, the National Arbitration Forum decided to transfer the ownership rights to Disney for all of these five domain names.

Nestle, on the other hand, had its own share of domain trouble, when Shuai Nian Qing registered to his own name the nestlecareers.com domain. After filing a complaint with the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, it got that domain name transferred in its possession.

The company proved that the author used the domain name to redirect to a website where commercial ads were being listed, as a way to increase its own revenues. As the website used the registered trademark “Nestle” in its name and did not redirect to a fan website, the Arbitration Center decided that it was employed to gain personal profit on the strength of a registered trademark and ruled in favor of Nestle.

These results come to add to a long list of companies that had trouble this year with domain name high-jacking: Lamborghini, Yahoo, MTV, Louis Vutton, T-Mobile, Oracle, Go Daddy, Electrolux, Ralph Lauren, NFL, Wikipedia, Lego, Siemens, Intel, Blackberry, Pfizer, Google, Jim Carrey, eBay and the list could easily go on for ten more rows.