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”.
A recent EU trade mark application for the word mark, PUT PUTIN IN, has been refused by the European Union Intellectual Property Office on the grounds of being contrary to public policy or to accepted principles of morality. While a fairly straightforward decision, this is a timely reminder…
Late yesterday UK time, it was reported that a lawyer for Twitter had sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg complaining about Meta’s new Threads app. Twitter claimed that it “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.