Intellectual Property Law

'Appeal' Of UDRP To District Court

By Marty Schwimmer

Plaintiff is a re-seller of Defendant's NUPRO product. It registered the NUPRO.COM name and used it as landing page to promote the NUPRO product (linking to its multi-brand site). Defendant brought a UDRP and for the reasons described in this decision, the panelist held that plaintiff's use exceeded a four part test of fair use by a re-seller:

1 the respondent must actually be offering the goods or services at issue;

2 the respondent must use the site to sell only the trademarked goods; otherwise, it could be using the trademark to bait internet users and then switch them to other goods;

3 the site must accurately disclose the registrant?s relationship with the trademark owner; it may not, for example, falsely suggest that it is the trademark owner, or that the website is the official site, if, in fact, it is only one of many sales agents;

4 the respondent must not try to corner the market in all domain names, thus depriving the trademark owner of reflecting its own mark in a domain name.

Under the 'appeal' procedure of the UDRP, plaintiff has now moved to stay the transfer and seeks a declaration of non-infringement in the SDNY (note that this is properly a de novo review by the district court).

Complaint Udrp Appeal

Full post as published by Trademark Blog on July 21, 2010 (boomark / email).