EasyGroup IP Licensing Ltd, the brand police for Stelios
Haji-Ioannou's easyGroup empire, argued that the name infringes its
easyHotel trade marks. It took action before the World Intellectual
Property Organisation (WIPO), arguing that Pascal de Vries of
Basel-based Dexion AG should be stripped of the domain name. It
cited trade mark and unfair competition laws to support its
claim.
De Vries registered easyhotel.ch in June 2005. His company
applied for the Swiss trade mark EASYHOTEL the same month in
classes relevant to telecoms and IT services. There are 45 trade
mark classes in total, and easyGroup said it had applied for the
same mark in the class relevant to hotel accommodation.
But easyGroup had not secured a trade mark registration – and
Swiss trade mark law does not recognise rights in pending
applications. Accordingly, easyGroup failed to convince the
panellist that it has any rights in Switzerland over the marks EASY
HOTEL and EASYHOTEL.
Even if it had established trade mark rights, easyGroup's claim
was doomed because De Vries convinced the panellist that he was
acting in good faith when he registered the domain name. At the
time, easyhotel was not a well-known trade mark in Switzerland and
De Vries said he did not know that an easyHotel was opening in
Basel.
The panellist also felt that confusion among customers was
unlikely, given the different nature of the services on offer and
the appearance of Dexion AG's website – which makes no mention of
easyGroup and does not use its distinctive orange and white
colouring.
De Vries accused easyGroup of trying to monopolise the name
"easy" in the same way as a cybersquatter, by registering a high
number of "easy" domain names without using them. He also
criticised easyGroup for not trying to resolve the matter
amicably.
In another WIPO decision announced today, easyGroup had more
success: it won a transfer of the domain name easyhote.com from an
apparent typo-squatter in the Republic of Korea.
