The Complainant is a well-known pharmaceuticals group with activities in several other fields. These include medical equipment and services and scientific and technological publications and services. In terms of scientific papers, the Complainant’s staff have published widely on subjects ranging from cardiovascular research to virology. There can thus be no doubt that acquisition of a .SCIENCE domain name containing the brand name might come into question for such a company and that its rights could, correspondingly, be infringed by its unauthorized registration and use by another.
The Complainant’s brand is, indeed, protected extensively in different countries under trademarks across numerous classes of goods and services. It has taken out several domain names under other generic Top Level Domains. And it has availed itself of the Trademark Clearinghouse facility established by ICANN in order to allow easy discovery of protected names by potential registrants.
The Complainant has hence established both a legitimate interest and rights in the disputed domain name.
For its part, the Respondent has failed to respond to the Complaint, has no apparent legitimate interest in a trademark-protected name that is unmistakeably the same as that of the Complainant and has earlier failed to respond to a cease-and-desist letter sent by the Complainant’s representative. The Respondent further appears to have no connection to the scientific world. But this becomes in any case of marginal relevance where the disputed .SCIENCE name incorporates in its entirety and without authorization that of a brand distinguished by a unique combination of a natural person name and a town name.
The facts of this case furthermore disclose nothing new to set apart the association of a protected name with the generic Top Level Domain .SCIENCE from that with other generic Top Level Domains. The Panel thus takes due note of the decisions of other UDRP Panels which have found in favour of the Complainant under comparable circumstances.
In the absence of any response from the Respondent, the Panel finds, as the Complainant contends, that it is improbable that the Respondent’s registration of the disputed domain name could have occurred without knowledge of the existence of the Complainant’s well-known brand. This is, however, not a proven fact; it is an inference. The Complainant further argues that such registration coupled with an inactive website may be evidence of bad faith registration and use. It cites the WIPO Telstra Corporation Limited v. Nuclear Marshmallows and CBS Broadcasting Inc. v. Dennis Toeppen cases in support of this proposition. The Complainant omits, however, to mention that the Telstra case, which was relied on in the CBS case, makes it clear that an inactive site should be considered as a potential factor indicating bad faith only by reference to the specific circumstances of each case and not in the abstract.
For the present case, the most pertinent part of the reasoning in the Telstra case is that it was “not possible to conceive of any plausible actual or contemplated active use of the domain name by the Respondent that would not be illegitimate, such as by being a passing off, an infringement of consumer protection legislation, or an infringement of the Complainant’s rights under trademark law”. The present Panel endorses this reasoning in inferring bad faith on the part of the Respondent since it is very hard to conceive of the disputed domain name being used by it in a way that would not be illegitimate on one of the grounds just cited. To the contrary, this inference is supported by the very fact that no response was submitted by the Respondent either to the cease-and-desist letter or to the Complaint.
The Panel is thus entitled to conclude that, had there been a legitimate purpose to the Respondent’s registration and use of the disputed domain name, the burden passed in these circumstances to the Respondent to provide some indication of it, which it plainly failed to do. In reaching this conclusion the Panel, however, stresses that its drawing an inference based on specific facts is not intended to be the same as applying an abstract principle and should not be confused with one.
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