Tuesday, April 22, 2014

#257 - tucowsreseller.ca - TRANSFER GRANTED

The Complainant established its case and the Panel transferred the Domain Name to the Complainant. The Registrant (through its notorious representative Daniel Mullen) attempted to respond to the Complaint, but it was rejected by Resolution Canada Inc. for non-compliance.

The Complainant, is a very popular domain name registrar since 1999, and the owner of the Canadian trademark TUCOWS. The disputed domain name was registered in April, 2012.

The Panel found the Domain Name was confusingly similar to the Complainant’s trade-mark, especially in light of the fact that TUCOWS is a coined word and inherently distinctive.  The Panel found that the Registrant registered the Domain Name in bad faith because the web site contained a hyper-link labelled “…may be for sale” and several hyper-links pertain to web site creation, hosting, and even links pertaining to the availability of domain names for sale, including tucowsreseller.ca. 


Of note: the panel did not consider the contents of without prejudice communications exchanged between the parties and respected the inadmissibility of this evidence had it been a formal court proceeding. 

You can read the decision here

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