At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it looks like domain name disputes are on-track for another record year, as I report in the newest issue (Q1 2021) of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest.

As the Digest says, the two leading service providers for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) seeing big increases in the number of cases and domain names they handled in the first quarter of 2021. Specifically:

At the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), trademark owners received 788 decisions in the quarter, up from 686 the previous quarter – an increase of 14.9%. And the total number of disputed domain names in those decisions (since many UDRP cases include more than one domain name) rose 28.4%, from 1,232 to 1,582 domain names.
At the Forum (formerly the National Arbitration Forum), the number of decisions spiked 12.1% (from 436 to 489) and the number of domain names rose 5.5% (from 658 to 694).

In my interview with Renee Fossen at the Forum (see page 9), she tells me one reason that may explain the rise:

Interestingly, trademark owners are even taking greater advantage of the often-overlooked Uniform Rapid Suspension Systems (URS), with a 6.9% increase in the number of decisions the first quarter of 2021 (see page 7).

This is consistent with a recent statement from WIPO, which reported the following:

Trademark owners in 2020 filed a record 4,204 cases under the WIPO-initiated Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) with the WIPO Center, a 14% increase over the previous year, passing the 50,000 cases mark since the start of this WIPO service.
With a greater number of people spending more time online during the COVID-19 pandemic, trademark owners are taking up this WIPO service to reinforce their online presence to offer authentic content and trusted sales outlets to Internet users across business areas. Representing 75% of WIPO’s generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) caseload, .COM demonstrated its continuing primacy.
WIPO UDRP cases in 2020 involved parties from 127 countries, up from 122 in 2019. The U.S., with 1,359 cases filed, France (786), the U.K. (411), Switzerland (256) and Germany (235) were the top five filing countries. WIPO also offers dispute resolution services for over 75 country code Top-Level Domains, such as .CN (China), .EU (European Union) and .MX (Mexico).

The current issue of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest provides exclusive data on these issues, including the following: