Normally when video game companies go into to Internet name court to take over domains using their trademarks, they walk out a winner. So you’d think that Nintendo, would be easily successful in the effort to get control of WiiU.com from a cybersquatter. You’d be wrong.
Astonishingly, Nintendo’s complaint before the World Intellectual Property organisation has been denied. The company was trying to get control of WiiU.com, which was registered back before even the Wii existed: Jan 13, 2004.
No reason was given for the denial in the WIPO’s decision, reached on June 19 but posted yesterday and reported by Fusible. WiiU.com right now is a placeholder page redirecting visitors to various links, some related to the Wii U, others not.
This would seem to be an ominous sign for Microsoft, which also does not control XboxOne.com and has filed a complaint to take control of it — though that matter is before a different body, the National Arbitration Forum.
Fusible noted that WiiU.com was up for auction before Nintendo filed its complaint in February. The company may now have to pay quite a hefty price if it wants the domain.
I’ve reached out to a Nintendo representative. Any comment the company makes will be updated here.
Complaint Denied: Nintendo loses dispute over WiiU.com domain name [Fusible]
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Comments
5 responses to “Nintendo Loses Appeal To Take Control Of ‘WiiU.com’”
I don’t think this decision would have much effect on the Xbox decision, as it was registered after the creation of the original xbox, while the article mentions that the website WiiU was registered in 2004, which was not only prior to the release of the wii, but before Nintendo even announced it as “revolution”.
However, the xboxone website was registered in 2011, at a time where people would have been undertaking attempts to guess the name of the upcoming console and register the website in a deliberate attempt to sell it back to Microsoft.
Honestly, if there was a single pronounceable website with a three letter name left on the regular dot com TLD (or if even half of all possible three letter combinations are left), I would be incredibly surprised (hence why they had to buy the original wii,com). I also doubt that there are all that many four letter urls on the dot com TLD that haven’t been registered.
Well, if he’s had the domain registered since before the first Wii even materialised, you cant exactly blame WIP on rejecting nintendos claim, just because nintendo released a product with the same name 9 years later. well before the WII name even existed, let alone WiiU
I have a bird named Google, I wanted to register the domain name for him but some jerk is sitting on the name “google.com”, I’ll have to file a complaint to try and take control of it.
Is the jerk doing anything with the website? or is it just a blank page. It’s likely all yours if they’re just squatting. Go for it!
I just tried google.com and it’s pretty empty.