BlackBerry has had a win at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), having nine domain names ownserships transferred to the company. All nine domains had been used to sell unauthorised BlackBerry products
WIPO’s Arbitration and Mediation Center transferred the domains to BlackBerry, including blackberrycollection.com, blackberrybritish.com, blackberrycanada.com and blackberryamerican.com.
BlackBerry filed a complaint with WIPO in November last year, but the respondent Ali Bizhani of Iran failed to respond.
The company alleged that the domains were confusingly similar to its trademarks, that Bizhani has no rights or legitimate interests in them, and that they are being used in bad faith. According to the complaint, the disputed domains offer BlackBerry’s products and appear to be created by Blackberry.
The sites were “designed to appear to look like official websites belonging to or authorised by” BlackBerry, and the company’s trademarks appeared throughout the websites, while a number of the domains are being used to offer goods for sale that are identical to those offered by BlackBerry.
“In fact, one of the respondent’s active websites provides confidential information of a device not yet launched by the complainant as well as the specifications of the device,” it said.
BlackBerry owns a number of trademarks worldwide for ‘BlackBerry’, including the US trademark ‘BlackBerry’ (registration number 2,672,464), which has been used since 1999.
Johan Sjöbeck, sole panellist in the dispute, found that the domains were confusingly similar, that the respondent had no rights or legitimate interests in them, and that the domains were being used in bad faith.
“Thus, the evidence in the case before the panel indicates that the respondent has engaged in a pattern of registering domain names in order to prevent the complainant from reflecting its trademarks in corresponding domain names,” said Sjöbeck.
The decision can be read in full here.
