Breakups are tough, both personally and professionally. Sometimes disputes over a domain name arise when both parties were earlier partners.
My Green Lab, Corp is a non-profit organization aimed at sustainability. It operates on the domain name MyGreenLab.org. The organization owns the USPTO trademark for MY GREEN LAB, registered in December 2014.
However, the domain name GreenYourLab.org was registered in April 2020. My Green Lab thus filed a UDRP over this domain name. The Respondent was a volunteer run network that worked in the same field as that of the complainant.
In fact both the parties had collaborated earlier. There was an instance where the Founder of the company had emailed a list of people that belonged to the complainant’s network. The CEO of the complainant and the Founder of the respondent had a conversation over this exchange of network contacts as well.
The complainant claimed this as the respondent trying to test its platform on their customers. While the respondent termed it a mistake.
The panel finds that the trademark registered by the complainant does not involve rights over ‘Green Lab’. The respondent presents sufficient evidence to prove that mailing the complainant’s network members was a mistake and was never repeated.
The panel notes that there is a similarity between the name of the two parties. But this commonality is not out of some bad faith but because of the common and similar nature of operations.
The panel denied the complaint.
You can read the full case here.
Join the Discussion