Two cases alleging cybersquatting, taken by Britain's no-frills budget airline EasyJet and France Telecom, were thrown out yesterday by UN arbitrators.
EasyJet has lost a cybersquatting case for the rights of the domain name www.easyjet.com to a Briton selling refills for printer cartridges while France Telecom lost a cybersquatting case over the right to Web sites pagesjaunes.com and pagesjaunes.net.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), which runs an arbitration system to evict cybersquatters or net users who register famous names hoping to make quick profits, said Easyjet had failed to prove that the holder of the site was using it in bad faith or had no legitimate interest in it.
EasyJet is depicted by its Greek Cypriot owner, Mr Stelios Haji-Ioannou, as an underdog fighting big business, but in this case it has ended up being cast as the neighbourhood bully.
This was also not the first cyberspace defeat for the airline. In May, British lingerie e-tailer easyshop refused to sell its web address to Mr Haji-Ioannou's Easy Group despite plans to rebrand.
EasyJet filed the WIPO complaint in May, alleging cybersquatting by Mr Tim Holt of Warrington, Cheshire, who had been first to register the site for his business providing refills for Ink Jet printer cartridges.
A WIPO panel said that although the Internet address was confusingly similar to EasyJet's trademark, it concluded that Mr Holt was in a different kind of business from EasyJet's.
It said it had no reason to doubt Mr Holt's version of the facts, noting his other domain names appeared to be legitimate.
"There is nothing to suggest that the domain name was registered with any intention to disrupt the business of EasyJet," the WIPO panel declared.
"The fact that all over Europe as well as in the United States, Australia, Canada, India and Russia, business directories are known as `yellow pages' precludes the complainant's claim to exclusivity based on its trademarks," WIPO said.
"We conclude that the public interest is best served if the Net users can access to business directories through more than one company and site," it declared. "For these reasons, the request to transfer or delete the domain name shall be denied."
France Telecom, which owns the trademarks Pages Jaunes and Les Pages Jaunes in France, filed the complaint in May, alleging cybersquatting by Les Pages Jaunes Francophones and France Online, both based in Los Angeles, which had been first to register the sites.
A WIPO panel conceded that the names were confusingly similar to France Telecom trademarks, but said their holders did not use them in bad faith and had registered them to set up a Web directory of French-speaking businesses.
The fast-track arbitration system of WIPO, the specialised Geneva-based UN copyright and intellectual property agency, allows firms and individuals to avoid costly lawsuits in cases when mischief is an obvious motive or serious money is at stake.
WIPO has received more than 1,000 cases related to disputed domain names since its arbitration system began last year.
Decisions were made in more than half of the cases, some 80 per cent of which resulted in favour of the complainants.
