November 10, 2004

No rights on initials

After dw.com, jcm.com, mma.fr, etc. I see in the new rmt.com decision a confirmation that the registration of a domain name made of initials and identical to a third party's trademark shall not be punished: "RMT is simply a 3-letter combination to which Complainant does not have exclusive rights. From RMT Aviation to the Rockville Musical Theatre, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of entities and individuals all over the world that use the common 3-letter combination RMT as abbreviations for their names." Again, Google has been used to give the evidence of the broad use of these initials: "A search on the Internet search engine Google.com search engine for “RMT” -- excluding “environment,” “environmental” and “engineering” to eliminate pages referencing Complainant -- yielded over 200,000 web pages containing the common 3-letter combination. This substantial third-party use is evidence that Complainant does not have exclusive rights to the term RMT and, thus, supports Respondent’s legitimate interest in the Disputed Domain".

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