Meg Whitman Loses WIPO Case

Posted on December 12th, 2008 by admin in Domain News | No Comments »

We recently blogged about Meg Whitman’s potential bid for Governor of California in 2010 and her pre-emptive strike against domain squatters squatting on megwhitmanforgovernor.com, megwhitman2010.com, meg2010.com, whitmanforgovernor. com and whitman2010.com.

The WIPO decision has been made on this matter and unfortunately/fortunately (depending on how you look at it) Meg Whitman has lost.

The Respondent – Domains For Sale, of Santa Monica, California – has kept their domain names as the WIPO panel concluded that even though Whitman is internationally famous – mostly for her exploits while she was CEO of eBay – there was insufficient proof that the domain names were similar or identical to a trademark owned by her.

“Merely having a ‘famous’ name is not sufficient to establish common law trademark or service mark rights in the name,” said sole panellist William Towns. “The Policy itself inherently makes a distinction between the protection afforded trademark rights and rights arising under the law of publicity which has been discussed in further details in several UDRP cases.”

“To be entitled to protection under the Policy, however, a personal name must function as a trademark, and for common law trademark rights to exist, the Complainant’s personal name must have come to be recognized by the public as a symbol which identifies particular goods or services with a single source,” he wrote.

Towns said Whitman’s name “must be used such that a relevant segment of the public comes to recognize her name as a symbol that distinguishes her services from those of similarly situated service providers.”

Towns was unable to conclude that Whitman “has provided services under the name ‘Meg Whitman’ as a source-indicator to a segment of the relevant buying public based on her performance as President and CEO of eBay” and hence her claim for the disputed domain names had to fail.