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eBearing News - SNR Roulements Loses Bid to Grab SNR.com Website Name
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The eBearing News
June 1, 2004
SNR Roulements Loses Bid to GrabSNR.com Website Name
copyright © 2004 eBearing Inc.
SNR Roulements (France, a division of Renault SAS)
has lost what many Internet legal experts labeled a heavy-handed and unfairly arrogant
effort to snatch the website name SNR.com from its current owners.
SNR filed its claim with the World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration
and Mediation Center in February 2004, under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute
Resolution Policy and Rules.
WIPO allows companies to file to recover website names which have been registered in
bad faith, by cybersquatters, ill-intentioned ex-employees, and others.
A U.S. court explained cybersquatting in one of the first cases:
"Any person who deliberately registers a domain name on account of its similarity to the name, brand
name or trademark of an unconnected commercial organization must expect to find himself on the
receiving end of an injunction to restrain the threat of passing off, and the injunction will be
in terms that will make the name commercially useless to the dealer."
The World Wrestling Federation and Nike were among the earliest winners of cybersquatter cases,
as were the New York Yankees with NewYorkYankees.com and actress Julia Roberts, for JuliaRoberts.com.
SNR Roulements, however, did not fare as well.
In March, the WIPO Center assigned a panelist to review SNR's claim and resolve the conflict.
The U.S. Company, SNR Inc. (for Sandra n' Richard, a small semiconductor consulting organization)
was founded in 1994, and registered the website name SNR.com. Although it was absorbed by another
organization in 2000, SNR Inc. had regularly advertised its services and used the SNR.com website
address in its advertising. Currently, SNR.com has genealogical information for the Sandra 'n
Richard's family, the owner taking down SNR.com's technical content as part of a multi-year noncompete
agreement with a new employer.
The legal team for SNR Roulements, according to several experts, made a fundamental mistake in
"shotgunning" the WIPO with "poorly researched claims against SNR Inc's right to SNR.com, that
ranged from borderline sensible to pompously and preposterously arrogant."
SNR Roulements, for example, argued that SNR.com should be turned over to them because
the contact information for SNR.com had a wrong fax number, somehow proving bad faith.
The company also claimed the family photo album on SNR.com was likely to
cause confusion among SNR Roulements customers -- that customers might believe the
family album was somehow the work of a bearing manufacturer. One analyst jokingly asked if
SNR Roulements really believed its customers were too stupid to know the difference between a
bearing and a family album.
SNR Roulements later argued the U.S. SNR Inc. is now defunct after the merger and should therefore
be forced to turn over the SNR.com website name for that reason. The arbiter quickly found SNR Inc.'s
merger clearly does not mean it therefore forfeits any business assets such as the SNR.com site name.
SNR Roulements then claimed the current registrants were in fact "cyber squatters" seeking to sell
SNR.com to the highest bidder. Never mind that the registrants had never tried to sell SNR.com.
The investigator found the current registrants are regularly approached to sell SNR.com
and always refuse.
In fact, it emerged that SNR Roulements was one of those companies contacting SNR.com, in 1997,
offering to buy the website name, otherwise threatening a lawsuit. When the owners refused,
SNR Roulements did not choose to pursue the matter again until 2004, ten years after SNR.com
had been registered.
The investigator found no malice of intention in SNR Inc.'s registration of SNR.com as its
website address, found no possible confusion between a bearing company and a genealogical
website, and that SNR Roulements must cease trying to force SNR Inc. to relinquish the address.
read the WIPO decision here
To put the claim in perspective, SNR Roulements is one of approximately 5,000 companies
worldwide which might like to have SNR.com, ranging from SNR Corp., a timing device distributor,
to the Sacramento News and Review, to the Society for Neuronal Regulation, to several
Schools of Natural Resources, to SNR Antiques, and thousands of others. Forcing its turnover
to SNR Roulements would be essentially arbitrary.
SNR Roulements has registered SNR.fr, SNR.de, SNR-Bearings.com, SNRBearings.com and others.
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- by Bruce A. Carr
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Entire contents Copyright © 1999-2008, eBearing Inc. All rights reserved.
eBearing.com and "... for everything that moves" are registered trademarks of eBearing Inc.
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