Company tries to reverse hijack Rocketship.com

An out-of-this-world attempt to get a domain name fails.

A World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) panel has found that a Swedish company tried to reverse domain name hijack rocketship.com.

App developer Rocketship AB filed the dispute against World Media Group, which has owned the domain (through common ownership) since 1998. That was well before Rocketship AB existed, meaning this case was dead on arrival because the domain couldn’t have been registered to target the Complainant.

Rocketship AB stated that it filed the case not merely as an attempt to take over a valuable domain name but because the domain name was being used in bad faith. The domain is tied to Mail.com’s free email services, and Rocketship AB had evidence that one person used an email tied to the domain in order to spoof the company.

But the panel noted that the domain owner and Mail.com had both addressed the issue of that one email address:

Complainant, represented by counsel, also did not disclose to the Panel in either its original filing, nor did it even acknowledge in its supplemental filing, that its allegations of the fraudulent email addresses had been responded to, and in fact, addressed by Respondent and its email service provider. Yet, despite knowing Respondent’s service was being used by thousands of users for more than two decades, and that in those two decades, it can only point to one instance in which an actual email address was used for improper purposes (where upon notice Respondent’s service providers took immediate action), Complainant continued to argue in its supplemental filing that Respondent was “using the domain rocketship.com in bad faith to execute the act of fraud.”

Rocketship AB asked to withdraw the case because it said the Swedish legal authorities started investigating the use of the email, but the domain owner denied that request.

If Rocketship AB had an issue with how the domain was being used, filing a UDRP was the wrong venue to address the issue. This isn’t a cybersquatting complaint. As the panel wrote:

It needs by emphasized that the UDRP is not intended to be a mechanism to address allegations of general fraud, but rather only cases where a complainant can prove that the disputed domain name was both registered and used in bad faith. Complainant, represented by counsel, evidently knew, or should have that this could not have been the case here, which is why bringing this UDRP Complaint constitutes an abuse of the administrative proceeding.

AWA Sweden AB represented Rocketship AB and ESQwire.com PC represented the domain name owner.