The UDRP case regarding DKY.COM


 

Dumankaya Yapi Malzemeleri SAN. VE TIC. A.S found Guilty Of Reverse Domain Name Highjacking on 12 year old domain name DKY.com.

  AYDIN & AYDIN Law Firm, Turkey loses UDRP case in its attempt to unfairly grab 18 year old DKY.com domain name for its client Dumankaya Yapi Malzemeleri SAN. VE TIC. A.S.

The WIPO panelist found Dumankaya Yapi Malzemeleri SAN. VE TIC. A.S represented by AYDIN & AYDIN Law Firm, Turkey to be Reverse Domain Name Hijackers.
 


The domain holder registered the domain name DKY.com back in 2003.

The Complainant's earliest registered "DKY" Trade Mark of which it has provided evidence was filed on October 16, 2012. This is around nine years after the Respondent registered the Disputed Domain Name (on October 9, 2003).


The panelist found that the DKY.com domain name had neither been registered in bad faith nor was the DKY.com domain name being used in bad faith.

 

The WIPO panelist stated:

"In the view of the Panel this is a complaint which should never have been launched. The Complainant should have appreciated that establishing registration and use in bad faith in respect of a domain name which had first been registered many years previously and which was a three letter acronym was likely to involve difficult considerations. The Complainant appears to have ignored any such considerations. It initially adopted an entirely unwarranted and unnecessarily aggressive approach to the Respondent in the form of its email correspondence including its email of August 6, 2015 (see above), which was materially incorrect in important respects. Having failed by that correspondence to force the Respondent to transfer the Domain Name at the price the Complainant was prepared to pay, it simply launched the present proceedings. These were presented in a very limited and inadequate manner, and with no proper consideration of the issues involved, the factual background, or what the Complainant had to establish if it was to present a credible case. Given the nature of the Policy and the multiplicity of previously decided cases dealing with similar issues in relation to short acronym type domain names, this was a case that had no reasonable prospects of success. "

The ruling on the case (Dumankaya Yapi Malzemeleri SAN. VE TIC. A.S v. Domain Administrator, Name Administration Inc. (BVI)) can be found at WIPO Case No. D2015-1757

 

In deciding that the Complainant was guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking, the panelist's conclusion sums up by saying:

"If the Complainant took competent legal advice it should have appreciated that this was the position. If it did not take competent legal advice it has only itself to blame. In all the circumstances the Panel agrees with the Respondent that the Complaint was brought in bad faith and constitutes an abuse of the administrative proceeding."

 

 
 
 

There are news stories about the DKY.com domain name UDRP case on DomainNameWire.com "Frank Schilling gets RDNH win on 3 letter domain name" and DomainInvesting.com "Another LLL.com UDRP: DKY.com".

There are numerous sources for "Reverse Domain Name Hijacking".  Amongst these are RDNH.com and HallOfShame.com (which includes a current list of those found guilty of trying to Reverse Hijack a Domain Name in which they had no legal rights. In other words they tried to bully the rightful owners into relinquishing their property and forcing these innocent parties to spend thousands to defend what they already own).

See also Does the UDRP do more harm than good? and The UDRP: A Problem at the Core of the Internet

 

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