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Retailer Ikea has recovered the domain name ıĸea.com after complaining to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
The domain, registered in October last year, allegedly resolved to a survey which Ikea believes was used for phishing activities. It now resolves to an inactive website.
In November 2017, Ikea complained to the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center over the domain, citing domain admin at Whois Privacy as the respondent.
According to Ikea, the respondent used Punycode to register the domain with non-ASCII characters to create a domain that is virtually identical to Ikea’s trademark.
Punycode is a special encoding syntax used to convert Unicode characters to ASCII, which is a smaller, restricted character set.
Ikea holds numerous trademarks in several classes for the mark ‘IKEA’, including Swedish trademark number 130,989; US number 1,661,360; and EU number 000,109,652.
The retailer’s franchise network comprises 340 stores in 28 countries, and it uses websites including ikea.com, ikea.us, and ikea.eu.
Sole panellist Nicolas Ulmer found that there are minor differences between Ikea’s mark and the domain, as the domain was not composed of ASCII English script.
“Thus, the disputed domain name <ıĸea.com> does not comport a dot on the ‘i’ of ‘ikea’ and the ‘k’ in the disputed domain name is shaped like a small capital K,” he said.
Ulmer added that the differences between Ikea’s trademark and the domain were “almost imperceptible”, but that the domain was virtually identical to Ikea’s mark.
He also found that the respondent lacked rights or legitimate interests.
On bad faith, Ulmer noted that it is “not plausible that the respondent stumbled on the name in the disputed domain name”.
He concluded that the domain had been registered in bad faith, and transferred the domain to Ikea.
The decision was made on January 17, and published on Monday, January 22.
Ikea, domain names, retail, WIPO, World Intellectual Property Organization, phishing,
