The US Clorox Company, a well-known manufacturer of cleaning and bleach products and other household chemicals, has filed a UDPR at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). What makes this case noteworthy is that the UDPR involves 375 domain names at once, the registration and use of which Clorox lawyers argue are unlawful.
Four domain names belong to .COM, while all the rest have been registered in the new generic top-level domains .XYZ, .SHOP and .CLUB. All the domains either use the word Clorox, which is a protected trademark of the company, or variations of its spelling. It would seem that the Clorox Company has a very good chance of winning. However, Domain Investing, reporting on this news, asks a reasonable question: what will the company do with all these domains if it wins the WIPO arbitration?
Obviously, the Clorox Company does not need all these domains; otherwise it would have registered them long ago. Paying every year to renew almost 400 unnecessary domain names may not be a huge financial burden for the company, which posted over $6 billion in revenue in 2019, but it is an outrageous waste of money. And if the registration is not renewed, the domains will again appear on the market, and someone else will register them. This could lead to another UDRP, and the filing is not free for the complainant. So far, the situation resembles a vicious circle.
