Company filed cybersquatting dispute against domain registered before it existed.
A UDRP panel has determined that the hat company MOVI, LLC tried to reverse hijack the domain name movi.com in a cybersquatting dispute.
MOVI launched on Kickstarter in 2019 and sells hats at movihats.com. It was perturbed that the owner of movi.com asked $350,000 for the domain name.
The domain was registered in 1995 and resolves to a parked page with ads related to movies. The current owner acquired the domain as part of a portfolio before MOVI, LLC existed. Thus, it was impossible that it targeted the non-existent company with its domain registration.
In finding reverse domain name hijacking, the three-person panel wrote:
As noted, the movi.com domain name was initially registered in 1995 and acquired by Respondent’s predecessor on July 3, 2003 and then by Respondent itself through its acquisition of its predecessor in 2018, and thus prior to the claimed 2019 first use in commerce of Complainant’s MOVI marks, registered in 2025. These circumstances persuade the Panel that Respondent could not have had Complainant and its then non-existent trademark in mind when registering the domain name, a fact easily discoverable by Complainant, and thus the Complaint was brought in bad faith and constitutes an abuse of the administrative proceeding.
The decision lists Lyndon Cook, Jr. as the Complainant’s representative. Jason Schaffer of ESQwire.com, P.C. represented the domain owner.
Source: https://domainnamewire.com/
