Although the number of UDRP decisions and disputed domain names dropped in the first quarter of the year, 2025 is shaping up to have a similar number of disputes as in 2024 (the second-most active year ever for the UDRP), as the data in the current issue (Q1 2025) of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest makes clear.

This 20-minute audio file — an AI-generated podcast — is based on the just-released issue of GigaLaw’s quarterly Domain Dispute Digest for Q4 2024, which provides detailed data about decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS).

Domain name disputes under the UDRP rose by 3.1 percent in 2024, an indication that cybersquatting remains a significant problem for trademark owners. Fortunately, though, the UDRP is still an incredibly effective tool, with more than 95 precent of decisions last quarter resulting in orders to transfer disputed domain names to the trademark owners who filed the complaints.

The number of decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – as well as the total number of domain names contained within those decisions – dropped in the third quarter of 2024. This represents the first decline since I began compiling and publishing this data more than four years ago.

The 10-year streak of record-setting filings under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) may come to an end this year, based on data obtained for this issue of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest, but the decline – if any – is likely to be inconsequential.

I recently interviewed my fellow UDRP panelist Professor Andrew Christie, chair of intellectual property at Melbourne Law School. He created the “passive holding” doctrine in only the second decision ever published under the UDRP, in 2000. The case, Telstra v. Nuclear Marshmallows, is truly a landmark decision because it addressed how a domain name not associated with an active website could be considered that it “is being used in bad faith,” as the UDRP requires.

The year 2024 began just like the past 10 years have ended: with a record-setting number of domain name disputes under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). The newest issue (Q1 2024) of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest provides detailed data about the ongoing increase in UDRP cases, including a 27.52 percent spike in the number of disputed domain names.

The number of domain name dispute filings has now risen for 10 consecutive years, as providers for cases under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) report ongoing enforcement efforts by trademark owners against cybersquatters.

Drafting a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) may seem like a simple process – but it's not. In this video, Doug Isenberg discusses two cases lost by trademark owners where the panels referred to "poorly prepared submissions" that were "so sparse as to be largely unintelligible" and where a complainant "failed to offer arguments or evidence to support any of its contentions."

The number of domain names in decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) increased by more than 18 percent in the third quarter of 2023, according to data from GigaLaw's Domain Dispute Digest.