For those of you that were wondering about the outcome of my David vs. Goliath post dated December 6th, the verdict is in.

Vincent Nguyen IM’d me a moment ago with a link to his freshly drafted article concerning the Administrative Panel’s findings. Since I was one of the people that had helped edit his responses to the suit, he knew that I would be excited to learn the outcome…

Vincent says:

Regular readers may be aware that the guys behind SlashGear/SlashPhone/MYiPhone/Unbox.IT (among others) have been involved in a domain name dispute with Motorola since October last year. The URL in question is MOTORAZR.com, which we registered back in July 2004, and has been a source of cellphone related news ever since.

Three aspects of Motorola’s complaint were ruled on: that the domain name is confusingly similar to a trademark in which they have rights; that we, the current owners of MOTORAZR.com, had neither rights nor legitimate interests in the domain, and that we had registered and used it in “bad faith”.

The WIPO Administrative Panel invited Motorola on several occasions to prove use of the MOTORAZR mark before they registered it in June 2005, abut they were unable or unwilling to do so. Instead, they claimed that anything involving MOTO (which had been registered back in 2001) should come under the Motorola umbrella and be protected as a mark of their own. The panel, reasonably, declined to give Motorola rights to everything from MOTORWAYS to the MOTORCYCLES that drive along them.

As for using MOTORAZR.com in “bad faith”, the panel disagreed with Motorola’s claim:

“[Motorola has given] no explanation of why the evidence of [their] real and actual use of MOTORAZR is so thin, why a year passed from product launch to trademark application, and why [they] failed to respond to the [WIPO] Panel’s express invitation to provide further information”

Because of that, the panel also factored out Motorola’s suggestion that MOTORAZR.com was expressly designed to misdirect readers into an advertising site.

Motorola’s claim, then, was dismissed, in no small part due to the fact that they apparently had no substance to back up their claims.

You can read the text of the entire decision here, but the most important line is this on at the end: “For all the foregoing reasons, the Complaint is denied.” Denied!

Has hell frozen over? The little guy has finally won.

No related posts.