A Telefire Fire & Gas Detectors Ltd. of Petach Tikva, Israel just lost a one member panel UDRP decision on the domain name Telefire.com in what in my opinion was a unnecessarily long opinion.
The Panelist basically calls out the Complainant attorney’s for doing a poor job of presenting the case and providing the panel with evidence that would have potentially changed the result and specifically for not using DomainTools.com to track ownership of the domain name over the years.
Here are the relevant facts and finding by the one member WIPO panel:
The Complainant is a company organized and registered under the laws of Isreal (sic) founded in 1979.
It specializes in the development, manufacture and sale of fire alarms and automatic extinguishing systems.
Its products have been installed in various buildings around the world, including Singapore and the Philippines.
The Complainant is the owner of various trade marks and applications for trade marks that take the following form:
Israeli trade mark no. 232876 in class 9 and applied for on September 16, 2010;
Community trade mark no 011471562 applied for on January 8, 2013 and which proceeded to registration on June 7, 2013 (i.e. 2 days after the Complaint was filed in these proceedings); and
Chinese trade mark application no. 12053285 in class 9 dated January 16, 2013.
The Complainant has also been the owner since December 1998 of the Domain Name , which it has used for a website from which to promote market and sell its products.
Telefire.com was first created on May 7, 2004.
Until recently, only a domain name parking page was being displayed from the Domain Name. On May 2, 2013 the Complainant sought to contact the owner of the Domain Name through Go Daddy’s “Domain Buy” service.
At some point thereafter the Domain Name may have been briefly used to display a “free Starter Web Page” advertising “Ecoproduct Co., of Mayfair Gardens, Commack NY, USA”.
On May 15, 2013 the Complainant received an email from GoDaddy’s “Domain Buy” service which stated as follows:
“We have successfully contacted the current domain registrant for domain TELEFIRE.COM. The domain registrant is giving serious consideration to selling TELEFIRE.COM but has not yet committed to entering negotiations. Once the domain registrant expresses an interest in reviewing offers, we will open negotiations with the guidelines you have set and contact you with updates and/or counter-offers that may exceed your maximum bid amount”
A further email from GoDaddy’s “Domain Buy” service later that same day stated:
“The current registrant of the domain telefire.com has indicated that they may be willing to sell the domain, however, they declined your maximum offer and are asking for $70,000.”
Unfortunately, for the Complainant there is a more fundamental problem in this case.…
