Texas company didn’t respond to allegations, but passes “fair use” test.
A company that rents Humvees in Texas is not cybersquatting, a UDRP panel has ruled.
Padre Island Combat Cruiser Rentals lets anyone rent a Humvee for as little as $150 per hour. It promotes its business using the domain HumveeRentals.com.
That caught the attention of AM General LLC, the military vehicle manufacturer that makes Humvees and owns a trademark for the term. It argued this was cybersquatting and asked for the domain to be transferred to it.
UDRP panelist Steven M. Levy determined that the rental company’s use of the domain falls under a type of fair use carve-out for UDRP disputes. Commonly referred to as the Oki Data rule, it provides leniency to resellers, distributors, and the like that satisfy a four-part test:
- must actually be offering the goods or services at issue
- must use the site to sell only the trademarked goods or services, otherwise it could be using the trademark to bait Internet users and then switch them to other goods or services
- must accurately disclose the relationship between the registrant and the trademark owner
- must not try to corner the market in all domain names, thus depriving the owner of the trademark from reflecting its own mark in a domain name.
In this case, it’s clear that the domain registrant is using the domain for a real business.
The only remedy in a UDRP case is for the domain to be transferred, which would have a significant impact on the rental company’s business. While there may be a remedy in the courts, UDRP is not the correct venue to settle this dispute.
This is the second case AM General has lost against a rental company this year. In both cases, the domain owners didn’t respond to the allegations.
Barnes & Thornburg LLP represented AM General.
Source: https://domainnamewire.com/
