#269 - ontariouniversities.ca - TRANSFER GRANTED

The Complainant, the "Ontario Universities Application Centre" (OUAC), is the not-for-profit centralized Ontario university application centre. The Registrant registered the domain name at issue on 18 August 2010 and resolved to a "parking page" inviting a person to buy the domain name. OUAC, ONTARIO UNIVERSITIES, ONTARIO, and UNIVERSITIES' APPLICATION CENTRE are not registered trade marks.


The Panel found that even if the marks had acquired enough secondary meaning to be considered unregistered trade mark, "Ontario Universities" is comprised of two generic descriptive terms that had a much broader meaning than OUAC. The Panel found that the Domain Name was not confusingly similar with any acquired right of OUAC. The Panel refused to make a finding of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking for filing this complaint even if done in "error".


You can read the full decision here.

#268 - grevin.ca - TRANSFER GRANTED

The Complainant established its case and the Panelist transferred the Domain Name to the Complainant.

Note to Reader:  Decision was written in French and roughly translated to English for the purposes of this summary.  

Despite frequent travel to Montreal throughout my life, I never heard of Musee Grevin Montreal Inc., the Complainant.  A quick visit to the web site opened my eyes to the impressive wax museum in Montreal with over 120 sculptures of famous French personalities.  Despite (1) not owning a registered trade-mark (2) not being the same company that owns the CAFÉ GREVIN design trade-mark (presumably owned by its parent/affiliated company in France), and (3) not owning the grevin.com domain name - the Complaint established rights in the GREVIN mark prior to the date the Domain Name was registered.  The Panel held that the registering and then forwarding of the Domain Name to a web site with archived information attempting to discredit the Complainant’s business was clearly done in bad faith.  Further, the Registrant was attempting to sell the Domain Name for $11,298.60 which was much higher than the cost of registration.  

You can read the decision here.