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CIRAs Decision in Yourcommunityrealty.ca Implications of Registering a Domain for the Purpose of Resale
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (“CIRA”) recently released its decision in a domain name dispute between Vivian Risi and Ray Fattahi over “YOURCOMMUNITYREALTY.CA”. The Complainant, Risi, carries on business in Toronto as a realtor and also provides other related services. She registered the trade-mark “YOUR COMMUNITY REALTY” with the Canadian Trade-mark Office in February 2005. She also owns a website accessed through the URL “YOURCOMMUNITYREALTY.COM”. The Registrant of the disputed .ca domain name, Fattahi, operates a website at gooya.ca, which provides news and business directory services targeted at the Persian-Canadian community in Toronto. Fattahi registered the disputed domain name in 2006, and used it to redirect users to gooya.ca, which contains advertising for several realtors. In May 2008, Risi received a notice of domain name auction for yourcommunityrealty.ca from Fattahi.
The three-Member CIRA Panel found the disputed domain name to be “confusingly similar” to Risi’s mark as the domain name read without the .ca suffix was identical to the mark.
The Panel also found that Registrant, Fattahi, registered the domain name “in bad faith”. In arriving at this conclusion, the Panel focused on whether Fattahi had registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of transferring it to the Complainant or a competitor, which constitutes bad faith, without requiring any further proof under the CIRA Dispute Resolution Policy. The Panel found that Risi’s registration of her trade-mark with the Canadian Trade-mark Office puts Fattahi on notice that the name is being used by someone else. Furthermore, the words contained in the domain name had nothing to do with the gooya.ca website. The Panel thus concluded that Fattahi registered the name for the purpose of selling it to Risi or her competitors, to Risi’s detriment.
On the issue of whether Fattahi had a “legitimate interest” in the domain name, the Panel noted that in order to establish a legitimate interest, a registrant must be acting in good faith and held that because of its prior finding that Fattahi had acted in bad faith, Fattahi did not have a legitimate interest. The domain name was therefore ordered transferred to Risi.
For additional information, visit:
http://www.cira.ca/en/dpr-decisions/00110-yourcommunityrealty.ca.pdf