In a decision of the National Arbitration Forum (US) given on 24 June under ICANN’s UDRP, world famous “sporting personality” Tiger Woods failed to have the domain name charlieaxelwoods.com transferred to himself.  Charlie Axel Woods is the name of Tiger’s son, born on 8 February 2009 – the respondent registered the domain name on 9 February 2009 and on 18 February offered it on eBay with the description “This is your chance to own the domain to a future golf legend or use it in some way to extort the current golf legend for some extra cash”.

While Tiger thus appeared to have a strong case in relation to the ‘bad faith’ element, the panellist dismissed the complaint, holding that it failed on the first element of the 3-pronged UDRP because the name was not a common law trademark or service mark and was not similar to any of Tiger’s trade marks.  For a complaint to be successful all 3 elements must be proved, and the panellist held that there was no need to consider whether Tiger’s case had been made on the other 2 elements (whether the respondent had any rights in the domain name and whether the name had been registered or used in bad faith).

This entry was posted by Jennifer Mills on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Domain Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.