eBay Wins Transfer Of Thousands Of Domain Names

On January 7, 2015, an administrative panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization (the Panel) issued its decision in eBay Inc v Du Hongxia, Liu Yujiao et al, which ordered the transfer to eBay Inc (eBay) of over a thousand domains containing the word ‘ebay’. eBay’s complaint was brought under theUniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which is applicable to the .com and .net top-level domains, among others. Du Hongxia and Liu Yujiao (the Respondents) did not contest the complaint.

The domain names at issue were numbered eBay domain names, such as ebay001.net and ebay999.net. According to the Registrar of the domains at issue, all had been registered in the name of either Du Hongxia or Liu Yujiao. This raised the issue of whether the complaint could proceed as a single, consolidated complaint, given the seemingly different identities of the Respondents.

The Panel stated that the two registrants could be joined if the consolidation would be fair and equitable and either (i) the registrants are the same entity; or (ii) the domain names in dispute, or the websites to which they resolve, are under common control. The Panel was convinced to join the two registrants based on the following “ample evidence” provided by eBay:

The Registrar is the same for all the Domain Names, there are similarities in the registrants’ email addresses, the domain name servers for the Domain Names are identical, the formats of the Domain Names are virtually identical, the Domain Names were all registered on either August 4, 2014 or August 5, 2014 and are each connected to one of three designs of website. There is nothing in the formats of the Domain Names, the dates of registration or the designs of websites to which the Domain Names are connected to differentiate between the named registrants.

Of note, when registering the domains, the Respondents had used a proxy service to conceal their identities from the Registrar’s WHOIS database. The proxy service provider was also named as a respondent but was ignored for the purposes of the Panel’s decision. In the Panel’s view, the proxy service was “a mere cloak for the identities of the underlying registrants […] [and] has no part to play in the merits of the dispute.”

On the substantive issues, eBay argued successfully that (i) the domain names at issue were confusingly similar to eBay’s trade-mark EBAY; (ii) the Respondents had no legitimate interest in the domain names; and (iii) the Respondents were using the domain names in bad faith.

This decision provides some interesting procedural insight into the UDRP process, particularly where many domains are involved and a connection between the registrants is suspected.