The arbitration court of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reached a decision in the Ter.com case. The UDRP was filed by SNCF Voyageurs, the French national railway company, which operates a public transport service in France called Transport express régional, abbreviated TER.
Of course, this fact alone cannot be considered reason enough to file a complaint. Strictly speaking, almost any three-letter domain would likely coincide with the abbreviation of a brand. But this case is more complicated: the Ter.com domain was parked, and the landing page hosted advertising links, such as links to sites for booking train tickets, including tickets for SNCF trains. This is already a serious reason to suspect the registrant of using of the domain name in bad faith, which was exploited by SNCF lawyers.
The domain registrant did not deny the existence of these PPC links, but explained that the links on the landing page were generated automatically by a third-party service without any control from the respondent. Observers thought the ruling could go either way. In the end, the panelist, Adam Taylor, carefully reviewed the case as well as precedents with the domains Kis.com and Snf.com among others, and decided the domain registrant did not register the domain name in bad faith. In a post, Domain Investing supported the ruling and praised the panelist’s professionalism. At the same time, the website notes that registrants of such valuable domains should be more careful: links on landing pages are in fact generated automatically, but most services allow users to block unwanted keywords. If the registrant had blocked railway advertisements on the page, there would not have been a problem at all.
