The Economist fails to obtain transfer of theeconomist.com

The publisher of The Economist has been unsuccessful in its attempt to obtain the domain name theeconomist.com from its registrant, who had owned it since 1996 and had only used it for a single webpage showing a picture of Alan Greenspan and the words "Alan Greenspan, Chairman Federal Reserve Board is The Economist of the century" alongside links to relevant (non-commercial) websites. Although the WIPO panel found that abusive use had been made of the domain, it refused to order a transfer because the respondent had sworn under legal penalty that he was unaware of The Economist journal when he made the registration, and the complainant had admitted it could not know his state of mind at that time. Under the WIPO Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, a complainant must prove both abusive registration and abusive use of the domain in order to succeed.

By contrast, the dispute resolution policy for .uk domain names requires that only one of these be shown (see below about the recent decision about MySpace that has succeeded in having the domain name myspace.co.uk transferred to it using Nominet's dispute resolution procedure). The respondent had registered the domain name in 1997, long before MySpace launched its social-networking site. The Nominet expert's main reason for finding the registration abusive was that after MySpace became a household name, the respondent posted links to various social-network site links on a pay-per-click "parking" site accessible via the domain name, enabling it to profit from the success of the MySpace site and also creating a risk of confusion between MySpace's services and those of other sites. See this for more-http://www.nic.uk/digitalAssets/27270_myspace.pdf.

This decision is a reminder that even if a domain name is registered in all innocence, the respondent's subsequent use of it may render the registration abusive.

Case: The Economist Newspaper Limited v TE Internet Services, Case D2007-1652, 5 February 2008.