Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

Internet portal Yahoo! Inc. has won the rights to 40 domain names in two hearings before the arbitration and mediation centre of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

In one of the cases, the names, including yahooemail.net, yahoofree.net, yahoofree.com and yahoochat.net were registered by an individual Jorge Kirovsky of Uruguay. All names pointed to a pet site. Kirovsy said that Yahoo! is a largely unknown trade mark in Uruguay and that it is “the name of a dog in Uruguay.” The panel took the view that the registration was in bad faith and confusingly similar to Yahoo!'s registered trade mark.

In a separate case, Yahoo! won the transfer of 36 domain names from a number of others, including misspellings such as ayhoo.com and wwwgeocities.com because they were again confusingly similar to Yahoo!’s trade marks and registered in bad faith.

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