Three industries – banking and finance, fashion, and internet and IT – accounted for nearly one-third of all cybersquatting disputes handled by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2017. Trademark owners filed an all-time high of 3,074 cases to WIPO’s Arbitration and Mediation Center. Cybersquatting involves the registration of domain names that belong to others.
Cybersquatting disputes relating to new generic Top-Level Domains (New gTLDs) accounted for more than 12% of WIPO’s 2017 caseload, which in total covered 6,370 domain names. Of all New gTLDs, registrations in .STORE, .SITE, and .ONLINE were the most-commonly disputed. With the addition in 2017 of .EU and .SE, 76 Country Code Top-Level Domain registries have now designated WIPO’s dispute resolution service.
To achieve the transfer of a domain name at WIPO’s Arbitration and Mediation Center , three cumulative conditions must be met:
- Infringement of the claimant's trademark rights. This mainly concerns registered brands, but also names of celebrities, and in some cases also commonly used names.
- The defendant has no rights or legitimate interests with respect to the domain name.
- The domain name was registered and used by the defendant in bad faith.
Who filed the most domain name cases in 2017?
The U.S. remained the country where most cases originated, with 920 cases filed in 2017, followed by France (462), the U.K. (276), Germany (222), and Switzerland (143). In total, parties from 112 countries were involved in case filings in 2017. In 2017, WIPO appointed 298 panelists based in 45 countries, and administered proceedings in 15 different languages.
The top sectors of complainant activity were banking and finance (12% of all cases), fashion (11%), internet and IT (9%), heavy industry and machinery (8%), and food, beverages and restaurants, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, electronics, entertainment, and retail at 6% each.
Since the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center administered the first case in 1999, total WIPO case filings passed the 39,000 mark in 2017, encompassing over 73,000 domain names.