50 year old company loses complaint against related domain name

Time is extremely important in business. You need to work hard but you need to pay enough respect to time also. Similarly registering a trademark is not enough many times. The timing of the registration of trademarks is equally important. As evident by this WIPO case.

The Complainant here is the director Shalex industries Pty Ltd. The company manufactures clear masonry sealers, waterproofing compounds/membranes, and architectural coatings. Been functioning since 1974, the company is a known name in Australia. It is a registered Australian firm under the name Shalex industries Pty Ltd. It also owns the trademark SHALEX and the domain name Shalex.com.au.

The Respondent here was a domain investor from Korea. The Respondent had registered the disputed domain Shalex.com, as before as 2011. The domain name was redirected to a blog post that has no relation to the Complainant.

The Panel received a request from the Complainant to keep the legal procedure in English. Although, according to the rules the language should have been Korean. The Panel in its understanding kept the language to English.

The Panel also noted that although the company has been operating under the name for a long time. It didn’t have the rights over the same until 2014. The Respondent registered the domain name way before these rights were acquired. Even the domain name Shalex.com.au was registered much later than Shalex.com.

Thus, although the Respondent action does hint towards Bad Faith, it couldn’t have been aware of the Complainant at the time of registration. The Complaint was thus denied.

You can read the full case here.


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