After more than 20 years of administering domain name disputes, WIPO had its busiest month ever for UDRP filings. That’s just one of the findings in the second quarter 2021 issue of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest.
The record number of WIPO filings is really startling, but it’s actually part of an ongoing trend. As the Digest shows:
The number of UDRP decisions increased 13.8 percent since the previous quarter, to more than 1,600.
The total number of disputed domain names in those decisions rose even greater, nearly 25 percent, to more than 3,000.
And WIPO wasn’t the only busy UDRP service provider. In fact, all five of the six active providers reported an increased caseload, up anywhere from as little as 1 precent to as much as 105 percent.
If the trend continues, WIPO’s overall domain name dispute work – which includes policies for a number of ccTLD or country code top-level domains, not just the UDRP – will rise for an eighth consecutive year, nearly doubling the number of cases since 2013.
As I explain in the Digest and as I’ve discussed before, the COVID-19 pandemic is certainly to blame in part for the rising number of domain name disputes, as many cybersquatters have spent the past year looking for new ways to make money by taking advantage of trademark owners on the Internet. But I also think a general growing awareness of domain name disputes, among both large and small companies, along with an increased willingness to invoke the UDRP, which was designed as a relatively quick and inexpensive alternative to litigation, are all leading to the spike in legal action that trademark owners are taking against cybersquatters.
GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest also reports that 95 percent of all UDRP cases in the quarter resulted in decisions ordering transfer of the domain names to the trademark owners who filed the UDRP complaints, which is consistent with the numbers we’ve seen recently. But for the first time that I’ve seen, trademark owners actually won 100 percent of all cases under the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) in the quarter. As I’ve said repeatedly before, the URS is an option for trademark owners in some cases (though importantly, not for .com domain names), but it has a high burden of proof and a limited remedy of suspension, not transfer, so it just hasn’t proven very popular. For example, there were only 41 URS cases in the quarter (as compared with more than 1,600 UDRP cases).
Of course, .com remains the most frequently disputed top-level domain in the UDRP, accounting for more than 1,800 domain names in the quarter. As the Digest shows, .shop and .xyz took the second and third place for the quarter, appearing in an unusually high number of disputes, pushing .org and .net lower on the list.
As I note in the Digest, one reason for the spike in .shop UDRP cases was because of a single case that involved 367 domain names. That case was filed by Clorox, the well-known manufacturer of cleaning products, and I will be discussing that case in detail in next week’s video on the GigaLaw YouTube channel.
Trademark owners from essentially all industries were among the most active filers of UDRP complaints in the quarter, with regulars such as Philip Morris and Google appearing on the top 10 list, but also with some lesser well-known brands such as Fenix (owner of the ONLY FANS trademark, which is used in connection with a social media platform especially popular in the adult entertainment industry in the U.K.) and Sodexo (one of the largest companies in the world specializing in food services and facilities management).
Many more details about who’s filing UDRP and URS complaints, as well as other data and trends about domain name disputes, are available in the complete version of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest.
