October 11, 2005

Trademark holder wins after UDRP appeal

Dagbladet Børsen is a Danish firm that publishes a newspaper under that name (trademark registered in 1982), and runs a website Børsen at borsen.dk and boersen.dk.
In 2000, the firm brought a case before the WIPO arbitration and mediation center to complain about the registration of borsen.com and boersen.com. After it lost, the Respondent appealed the UDRP decision before the Danish courts. According to a report, "[i]t claimed that the use of the domain names did not violate Dagbladet Børsen's trademark right to BØRSEN and that WIPO's decision was not binding, as the arbitrator was disqualified. It also argued that Dagbladet Børsen did not own the trademark BØRSEN at the time of the complaint."
As the WIPO panel previously did, the Supreme Court found that the designations boersen and borsen are confusingly similar to the trademark BØRSEN. It hence ruled that commercial use of boersen.com and borsen.com infringed the trademark holder's rights, and that the registration had been made in bad faith.
Strangely enough, according to the report, "[t]he court remarked that it is not a function of the courts to rule on decisions made by the private complaints board WIPO."

Denmark Supreme Court, Digital Marketing Support v Dagbladet Børsen (356/2003).

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