Cooper Mills DomainLawyer
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French company TOBAM has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking in a judgment here.
This is another one of those cases where the Complainant was less than forthcoming in providing the Panel with full disclosure:
2. The Complaint lacks candour in that it makes no mention of the communications between the parties via the Sedo website in 2011 – 2013 regarding purchase of the disputed domain name by the Complainant. Even if the Complainant had no "written evidence" of such communications, and even if it were unable to access the Sedo site to obtain such evidence (and the Complainant has not clearly stated that that was so), the Complainant should at the least have mentioned the exchanges. Whether or not the Complainant considered that these matters were directly relevant to bad faith, nonetheless the Complainant relied on its allegedly unanswered 2016 letter and email as evidence that the Respondent had provided false contact details and so the failure to mention the previous extensive communications conveyed the misleading impression that the Respondent was generally evasive and non-responsive. (For completeness, the Panel would add that it draws no conclusion from the Complainant's failure to refer to the Respondent's email of June 7, 2016, and the Panel accepts the Complainant's assertion that it never received it.)
This is another reason for keeping all communications relating to offers and enquiries. I always save emails to the cloud just in case I ever need to dig it up later.
This is another one of those cases where the Complainant was less than forthcoming in providing the Panel with full disclosure:
2. The Complaint lacks candour in that it makes no mention of the communications between the parties via the Sedo website in 2011 – 2013 regarding purchase of the disputed domain name by the Complainant. Even if the Complainant had no "written evidence" of such communications, and even if it were unable to access the Sedo site to obtain such evidence (and the Complainant has not clearly stated that that was so), the Complainant should at the least have mentioned the exchanges. Whether or not the Complainant considered that these matters were directly relevant to bad faith, nonetheless the Complainant relied on its allegedly unanswered 2016 letter and email as evidence that the Respondent had provided false contact details and so the failure to mention the previous extensive communications conveyed the misleading impression that the Respondent was generally evasive and non-responsive. (For completeness, the Panel would add that it draws no conclusion from the Complainant's failure to refer to the Respondent's email of June 7, 2016, and the Panel accepts the Complainant's assertion that it never received it.)
This is another reason for keeping all communications relating to offers and enquiries. I always save emails to the cloud just in case I ever need to dig it up later.