Coachella wins a cybersquatting dispute that was really a trademark dispute

A panelist ordered a legitimate non-profit’s domain name transferred.

Coachella in 2018. Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Coachella music festival has won a dispute it filed under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP), resulting in the transfer of the domains teachella.net and teachella.org.

Festival organizers certainly could have a trademark dispute with the owner of the domains, but the FORUM panelist who heard this case erred in ordering the domains transferred to Coachella.

Zak Muscovitch outlined the many errors in today’s ICA UDRP Digest.

A legitimate non-profit, Teachella Foundation, Inc., owns the domain names. It has used them for years to promote a teacher festival.

You can argue that Teachella’s name is problematic. According to Coachella, Teachella once promoted its event as “the Coachella of teacher celebrations.”

That could be trademark infringement, and a competent court could make that determination.

But FORUM, aka National Arbitration Forum, is not the proper forum to hear a trademark dispute like this. It’s the proper forum to hear clear-cut cybersquatting cases under the UDRP.

Yet, panelist Carol Stoner pushed this trademark dispute through UDRP and decided the domains should be transferred. A legitimate business is about to lose its domain name if it doesn’t file a lawsuit to block the transfer.

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