Barclays Bank — the multinational banking and financial services company with 48 million customers — filed a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) against a domain name registrant identified as “Barclays Bank.”
I discuss the case in a new video on YouTube.
The case raises an interesting issue about whether a cybersquatter can defend itself under paragraph 4(c)(ii) of the UDRP, which allows a domain name registrant to establish “rights or legitimate interests” in a domain name by demonstrating that it is “commonly known by the domain name.”
As I explain in the video, the Whois record actually showed the registrant of the domain name — <barclays-group.ltd> — as “Barclays Bank.” So, this could have presented a complicated issue. But Barclays said that the domain name registrant had “no apparent connection” to its business, and the cybersquatter failed to submit a response.
As a result, the panel wrote:
[T]he use of the Complainant’s name [‘Barclays Bank’] to register the disputed domain name as evidenced by the WhoIs, falsely suggests affiliation with the Complainant and points to an intention to confuse Internet users by leading them to think that the disputed domain name belongs to the Complainant or to one of the Complainant’s group of companies…. [N]o evidence has been adduced that the Respondent has been commonly known by the disputed domain name or by the name ‘Barclays Bank’…
This is consistent with plenty of other decisions under the UDRP where cybersquatters have falsely identified themselves by a name that corresponds to the relevant trademark or the trademark owner. In those cases, UDRP panelists have written that such a fake name “does not alone suffice to show that the Respondent is commonly known by the disputed domain name”; or that it “is not a believable name.”
So, in the end, the Barclays case was indeed a pretty simple case, and the panel ordereds the <barclays-group.ltd> domain name transferred to the real Barclays Bank. But trademark owners should never assume anything, which is why I always like to proactively address this issue in the complaint when it arises, just to be sure that the panelist won’t be confused by what can sometimes be seen as a truly confusing set of facts.
