On 25 August 2015, Matthew Harris, Waterfront’s joint head of Intellectual Property and Dispute Resolution gave his 300th judgment in a domain name case.
Matthew was first appointed as a WIPO Panelist for Domain Name disputes by the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva in 2002 and subsequently was appointed to similar roles at Nominet and the Czech Arbitration Court.
Over the course of the last 13 years Matthew has either made or been part of a panel that made decisions involving approximately 500 domain names and 3 new gTLDs.
Although his 300th decision was two weeks ago, it has only recently become publically available. The case involved a dispute between Dutch company and a US individual over rights in the domain name. The decision was unusual in that it included a rare finding of “reverse domain name hijacking”.
The current legal framework in the UK does not allow copying of copyright-protected material for training generative AI models, except where it is carried out with permission of the copyright owner or done in a research or study context and for purely non-commercial purposes.
This matter deals with the Claimant’s (‘TVIS’) allegation of infringement and misrepresentation in relation to its “VETSURE” trade mark by the Defendant (‘Howserv’s’) “PETSURE” trade mark, used for pet insurance. In the first instance decision, the claim was dismissed due to the marks being highly descriptive and “not…