OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
A UDRP complaint was filed for the domain name Outdoor-Fitness.com at the National Arbitration Forum. NAF doesn’t reveal the Complainant before the decision is in but the most obvious Complainant is the owner of the non-hyphenated .com domain: outdoorfitness.com.
Outdoorfitness.com is owned by Outdoor Action Fitness, LLC since 1998. The company has a US registered trademark for “TINA VINDUM’S OUTDOOR FITNESS” since September 29, 2009. Trademark’s first use in commerce is claimed to be March 2006.
Outdoor-Fitness.com was registered in 2004, before the trademark’s first use, but it seems to have changed ownership since then.
All is good so far but this Complaint will be denied. There is a disclaimer in the trademark that is put there to protect descriptive terms like “Outdoor Fitness” and domains like Outdoor-Fitness.com. The disclaimer says:
NO CLAIM IS MADE TO THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO USE “OUTDOOR FITNESS” APART FROM THE MARK AS SHOWN
I am sure that the Complainant knows he shouldn’t have filed for this complaint but he filed it anyway. This is the type of Complaints that should get a Reverse Domain Name Hijacking ruling even if respondent never replies.
Sure, the domain Outdoor-Fitness.com displays fitness PPC ads but how differently could someone use a descriptive domain like this?
Good article. This UDRP complaint definitely has no basis. Those two words are common dictionary words. In the English language there’s only about 12,000 commonly used words. In fact, the first 100 most common words make up about one-half of all written material!
Compare those few thousand everyday used words to the millions and millions of US trademarks that exist today. There’s no possible way that number of trademarks could exist if each mark could hold hostage common words just for themselves.