Whew - sorry for the long time between posts.  The last six months have seen explosive growth in our client base and matters handled and we’ve been working hard to serve our new clients.  We are fortunate to have acquired a great group of interesting and talented entrepreneur clients working in a wide range of cutting edge Internet businesses.  We have been drafting solid terms of service agreements, privacy policies, web development contracts, web business purchase agreements, and handling a host of other transactional matters for these clients.  To help deal with this welcome boom we have recently moved offices and added staff so I’m aiming to get back to a more regular blog posting schedule. 

While we handle numerous types of Internet law business matters, one area that I enjoy the most is domain name arbitration cases.  We help entrepreneurs and businesses through the UDRP arbitration process to recover domain names that they should rightfully own.  Our most recent victory on behalf of our client involved a non-U.S. registered trademark (the mark is registered in the British Virgin Islands).  The entire publicly available case decision can be found here: http://domains.adrforum.com/domains/decisions/1191809.htm.  The panel reaffirmed that trademark registrations in countries other than the U.S. are respected.

Another interesting case we handled recently involved the name of a celebrity and his common law trademark rights in his own name as a domain name.  There have been a line of past cases discussing the common law rights that arise in the name of a famous person and that makes these rights enforceable, even without a registered trademark.  That UDRP decision  and references to the prior cases in this area can be found here: http://domains.adrforum.com/domains/decisions/1106240.htm.

Of course, not every case has to go to arbitration and we’ve successfully recovered domains (or defended their ownership) without the need for a UDRP complaint but when needed we don’t hesitate to taking that step. And part of what makes the process so interesting is that every situation is so fact-specific.  Which is why we’re required to say that every case is fact-specific and unique and that prior case results do not necessarily predict or guarantee a similar result in the future.  If you think someone has a domain name that should belong to you, or if someone is making that claim about a domain name you own, don’t hesitate to contact us so we can discuss whether we can help you.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Domain Name Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.