Despite problems in his personal life,gambling debts and metatarsal injuries Wayne Rooney has at least been on target with WIPO in a dispute over ownership of www.waynerooney.com.
Following on from an earlier triumphant success against the same individual Huw Marshall over www.waynerooney.co.uk ( a day earlier via Nominet) WIPO ruled that the footballer by way of his company Stoneygate 48 Limited had legitimate rights that were infringed under the WIPO rules (UDRP).
The rules (4(a)) state that a complainant has to prove three things:
- that it has rights in a trademark identical or confusingly similar to the domain name under dispute and
- the respondent has no legitimate rights or interests in the domain name and
- the domain name has been registered and used in bad faith(examples might include use of name to generate advertisement income).
Huw Marshall had registered the domain names after watching Rooney in Everton’s Youth Team in 2002 and had claimed he wanted to operate a non-commercial fan site. The website in fact did not transpire but had links to sponsorship sites though
The sole arbiter held that the registration of the domain name in advance of the creation of the trademark rights did not invalidate the claim that the rights were identical or confusingly similar. The argument of a fan site being evidence of a legitimate interest did not success as nothing had been done for two years to develop this and so had no legitimate interest in the domain name. Finally bad faith was shown by the link to two commercial fan sites and the feeling that Rooney had been thought of as “hot property” to exploit in 2002.
WIPO deals with disputes of .com, .org and .net whilst Nominet deal with .uk domain names.Though the facts and the results of the two cases were the same the issues differed due to differences in the respective organisations’ dispute resolution service policies.
