Trademark Law

We have recently posted concerning Kellogg?s National Arbitration Forum UDRP loss in its effort to secure eggo.com.  The prior post can be found here and here.  One of the most interesting things about this particular case is the fact that the UDRP proceeding never had any merit and virtually no chance of success.  Kellogg?s attorneys either didn?t know how to obtain the appropriate information in order to correctly analyze the eggo.com registration as a potential domain dispute or, more likely, simply ignored the law and attempted to use its economic leverage in order to essentially steal the domain name property from the legitimate registrant.  As many have already noted, Kellogg?s attempt to use the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy in order to have the domain name transferred to its control; smacks of trademark abuse. 

But the most interesting part of this decision is that Kellogg?s attorney discussed the possibility of purchasing the domain from the legitimate registrant and consulting company using eggo.com as the domain.  This is a highly valuable four letter domain with established traffic.  The domain registrant essentially offered to sell the domain to Kellogg for $100,000.00, which is a small fraction of the domains worth on the open market let alone to Kellogg Corporation.  Instead of jumping on the opportunity to own this valuable domain at a bargain price, Kellogg and its lawyer got greedy.  It is now likely that the registrant?s asking price will jump dramatically from the initial $100,000.00 asking price. 

Good advice is critical to both domain name registrants and trademark holders in these types of domain dispute matters.  The decision you make based on your attorney?s advice could not only mean the difference between success and failure, but end up making you look pretty silly in the transparent world of the web.