Domain name Weef.com dispute case dismissed, WIPO supports original owner

Recently, a UDRP dispute case has received attention. The disputed domain name is a four-letter domain name: Weef.com. The domain name has been registered since 2003 and is held by Chinese citizen Wang Yajun. It is used to receive emails and display the landing page of the registrar MarkSmile. The complainant is WE‑EF LEUCHTEN GmbH, a German lighting manufacturer, whose parent company is the Nordic Fagerhult Group. The plaintiff owns multiple registered trademarks of "WE‑EF" and holds domain names such as weef.eu and we-ef.com.

The plaintiff claims that Weef.com is highly similar to its brand and is exactly the same after removing the middle hyphen, which is likely to cause public confusion; and accuses the defendant of knowing its trademark as early as when registering the domain name, which is a malicious registration, and the domain name page once contained sales information, and may even be used for phishing attacks.

In response, the defendant said: the domain name was registered long before the plaintiff filed a trademark application in Indonesia in 2013, when the plaintiff had almost no reputation in China; the domain name has long been used for private emails and has not been actively used for commercial promotion or misleading behavior; the landing page is the default page of the registrar, and privacy protection and failure to respond to the lawyer's letter are legitimate choices.

After hearing the case, the WIPO arbitration panel held that although "weef" and "WE‑EF" are similar and meet the confusion requirement, and the plaintiff does have trademark rights, the evidence is obviously insufficient in terms of "bad faith registration and use". The arbitrator pointed out:

The domain name was registered earlier than most of the plaintiff's trademark applications;

The plaintiff failed to provide sufficient evidence to show that the defendant had clear malice when registering the domain name;

The relevant phishing or sales allegations also lack technical evidence support;

The plaintiff's speculation about the domain name sales platform and third-party registrar cannot be established as facts.

The final ruling dismissed the complaint, and Weef.com continued to be retained by the current owner.