When Panel Laziness Reaches Olympic Levels of Incompetence

27 August 2018

Picture this: a UDRP panelist so profoundly uninterested in doing their job that they glance at a no-response case, spot a Russian bank's shiny trademarks from the 2010s, and decide – with the investigative vigor of a sloth on sedatives – that an American company must have registered sber.com in bad faith to exploit said bank. Never mind that Struever Brothers, Eccles, and Rouse (SBER) has been a legitimate US construction firm since the 1970s, long before the internet was a thing and decades ahead of Sberbank's global ambitions. This isn't adjudication; it's what happens when laziness masquerades as legal reasoning, inferring bad faith from thin air while ignoring the glaring acronym match.

The panel's "inference" that the respondent targeted "SBER" and "SBERBANK" trademarks? Pure fiction, conjured because the domain was passively held and cease-and-desist letters went unanswered. No digging into the respondent's history, no acknowledgment that SBER was a forfeited Maryland entity because – plot twist – the company had wound down operations after 40+ years of building stuff, not cybersquatting. Instead, we get a default transfer faster than you can say "rubber stamp" handing over a domain registered in good faith for a real business to a complainant whose trademarks postdate the domain by years. If this is "independent" paneling, then I'm the Czar of Russia.

It is a typical default decision issued by a panelist who doesn’t feel the need to look at obvious facts. It is quite clear that the domain name was registered by and for a legitimate business whose initials are SBER.

– John Berryhill, Ph.d., Esq.

Udo Pfleghar, the panelist in question, apparently couldn't be bothered to Google the respondent's initials or business history, opting instead for the path of least resistance. The result? A Russian bank scores a free domain upgrade, while a legit American outfit gets shafted posthumously. In the hall of UDRP hall-of-shame moments, this one shines like a beacon of bureaucratic ineptitude.

...the Panel infers that the Respondent had the Complainant’s trademarks “SBER” and “SBERBANK” in mind when registering the disputed domain name, which was therefore registered, and is being (passively) used in bad faith, in order to take advantage of the reputation and the renown of the Complainant’s trademarks.

Moral of the story: When your entire decision hinges on "inference" without a shred of evidence-checking, maybe reconsider your career in dispute resolution. The bull – or in this case, the bear – charged blindly, flattening fairness in the process. If panel intelligence were measured in effort, this one would be running on fumes.

https://udrp.adr.eu/decisions/detail?id=62faaf03bfe30f8f4e0cda22