The consideration of another domain dispute in the arbitration of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ended with an amazing scandal. Candy Cloud IP LLC filed a Uniform Domain Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) complaint against the domain name CandyCloud.com. The case looked like a losing case from the very beginning, since the domain was registered before the company and its trademark. And representatives of Candy Cloud tried to stock up on additional arguments.
One of them seemed to them very convincing. The registrant for the CandyCloud.com domain is Mike Morgan, who lives in Canada. And apparently doing the most cursory Whois search, Candy Cloud found that Mike Morgan was listed as the registrant of 768 domain names. This was supposed to indicate that the aforementioned Mike Morgan is clearly a cybersquatter - why would a law-abiding person need so many domains?
The logic, to put it mildly, is flawed, because a law-abiding person could well be a domain investor. But the reality turned out to be even simpler: Candy Cloud did not bother to check the data of registrants more carefully and realize that Mike Morgan is a very common combination of first and last name in English-speaking countries. 768 domain names belonged to a wide variety of people, including a designer, the head of an engineering company, a partner in a law firm, a director of a think tank, etc. All these people have in common only that they are all called Mike Morgan.
A panel of three WIPO arbitrators appreciated the plaintiff's ignorance and found him guilty of attempting to retake a domain name, according to Domain Name Wire. However, the troubles of Candy Cloud IP LLC may not be limited to this. Dozens of Mike Morgans received the WIPO arbitration award by email because their domains were mentioned in the complaint. Thus, they all learned each other's e-mail addresses: the list of addresses was contained in the field of copies of the letter. And potentially this can be seen as a disclosure of personal data, provoked by an illiterate complaint from Candy Cloud.
