Alo Yogo is a reverse domain name hijacker

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Maker of yoga apparel filed baseless cybersquatting dispute in effort to snag domain ALO.com.

Nice yoga clothes, but questionable ethics.

Yoga apparel company Alo Yoga (Color Image Apparel, Inc.) has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name ALO.com.

The company, which uses the domain name AloYoga.com, filed a cybersquatting case with World Intellectual Property Organization. The three-member panel found that the complaint was baseless for a number of reasons.

A key reason: the current owner of ALO.com registered it before Alo Yoga even existed, so it clearly wasn’t registered to target the yoga apparel company.

In fact, Alo Yoga’s initial filing neglected to address the issue of bad faith.

In finding reverse domain name hijacking, the panel wrote:

…the Complainant ought to have known that it could not succeed under any fair interpretation of facts reasonably available prior to the filing of the Complaint, as the disputed domain name was registered several years before the Complainant’s existence and there is no evidence of the Respondent’s use of the disputed domain name in connection with the Complainant’s trademark.

In addition, the Complainant mainly based its Complaint on allegations without submitting supporting evidence, and the Complainant appears to have actually known that it could not succeed as to the third element, as demonstrated by its failure to address the bad faith issue in its initial filing of the Complaint.

The yoga clothing company was represented by Thoits Law. The domain owner was represented by ESQwire.com.



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