In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Arbitration and Mediation Center of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO, Geneva) accepted for review and issued a decision on a complaint of the Russian company CIAN concerning the domain name cian.bz, registered by a Russian individual in 2009.
This is the first case in the domain zone of Belize (BZ), in which a Russian company became the plaintiff. In addition, this is the first (and, apparently, the only) dispute over this domain zone heard at WIPO in 2018.
The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) was approved by ICANN on August 26, 1999. Since then, the Arbitration and Mediation Center of the World Intellectual Property Organization, located in Geneva, Switzerland, has become the leading domain dispute resolution platform.
According to head of the Internet & Law company Anton Sergo, who represented CIAN, the UDRP uses a special legal wording, “unfair domain name registration,” according to which a domain name registration should be considered in bad faith if it meets three conditions:
- the disputed domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights;
- the respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the disputed domain name;
- the respondent has registered and is using the disputed domain name in bad faith.
The arbitrator agreed with the arguments of the lawyer that the defendant has no rights or legitimate interests regarding the domain name cian.bz, and that his registration was in bad faith, especially since the respondent created a clone of cian.ru, owned by CIAN.
Since the domain was registered by a Russian national through a PDR foreign registrar, the proceedings at the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center were conducted in English.
The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) has long been used for all public domain names and a number of national domains. Over 2,000 new domain zones (including .РУС, .МОСКВА and .MOSCOW) also fall within its scope.
