WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) has recently ruled in favour of Sanofi, a global pharmaceuticals manufacturer involved in producing COVID vaccines, in an important UDRP case.
The 3 member UDRP panel ruled that sanofi.sucks a domain name registered by a third party registrant, was identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by Sanofi.
The domain name sanofi.sucks was registered by Honey Salt a company based in Turks and Caicos. It turns out that Honey Sale has registered thousands of .sucks domain names that include brand names from various parts of the world, including Australia.
Many of these domain name registrations are linked to the website everything.sucks, which claims to be:
“a non-profit organization and communications forum for social activism… This website allows users a voice to share their point of view online about what sucks in the world.”
This website is actually a forum to provide criticism and negative content of brands copied from third-party websites such as TrustPilot and GlassDoor.
There are several Australian and New Zealand headquartered companies that appear on the site.
The recent win by Sanofi means that if you are a trademark owner of a brand that is featured on everything.sucks then you may have a case to dispute the .sucks registration of your trademark brand.
Brandsec has recently won a number of important UDRP cases in our efforts to protect our clients against third-party registrations that infringe or misuse their trademark.
Given the proliferation of new GTLDs Brand owners should also review their domain name policy. If you do not have protection measures in place, even as simple as a basic monitoring service, you should review your policy to have a service that alerts you to third-party registrations and misuse of your brand.
About brandsec
Brandsec is a corporate domain name management and brand protection company that look after many of Australia, New Zealand and Asia’s top publicly listed brands. We provide monitoring and enforcement services, DNS, SSL Management, domain name brokerage and dispute management and brand security consultation services.
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