Ben
Two cybersquatting complaints perfectly illustrate why holding a trademark isn’t necessarily enough to get a domain transfer, as Enterprise and xHamster found out this week.
To start with the successful complaint, xHamster brought a case against xHamsterPorn.net, on the basis that it was confusingly similar and deliberately trading on the brand’s existing recognition within the same industry. An arbritrator agreed, according to xBiz, ordering the domain to be transferred.
Though it won that one, the company has at least five more similar cases pending against similarly-named domains.
Considerably less successfully, Enterprise Holdings (the car hire company), which owns the domain EHI.com and trademarks for ‘EHI’, tried to gain control of EHI9.com, which redirects to a porn site.
In that ruling, the same arbitrator, David Sorkin, decided that the Chinese owner of the domain wasn’t typosquatting, as asserted, because there was no suggestion that it was trying to trade on a deliberate typo of the Enterprise brand.
