Elephant.co.uk is a brand of Admiral Insurance Services, fronted at the web site by a cartoon character called Trunkie. The brand makes millions from selling cheap car insurance over the web. But the owner of elephant.com, Adam Dicker from Ontario, told an arbitration panel that he had never heard of the British business.
This wasn't Admiral's first attempt to net elephant.com. Last February, Admiral tried to buy it from then owner Bradford Oberwager, offering him $18,000.
But Oberwager told Admiral that he was already in the process of selling it to Dicker, for the sum of $22,500. He suggested that if Admiral was prepared to up its offer to $32,000, he would ask Dicker if he would walk away in return for some cash. Admiral agreed, but Dicker refused the offer and took control of the name.
Admiral contacted Dicker direct, offering to buy the name. Dicker, a web developer who controls many web sites for himself and his clients, said the name was not for sale. Then, after a second request, he said: “The domain is not for sale for less than 1 million dollars. 3 offers are currently pending”.
He put lots of information about elephants on his web site and signed up to Google AdSense to get money-making ads on his site. Such ads are placed on behalf of Google's advertisers. They are placed automatically by Google, the choice of ad being paired with the subject matter of the hosting web site.
On the basis that some of these ads linked to other insurance companies, Admiral filed a cybersquatting complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), arguing that Dicker had no right to the name and was using it in bad faith.
Dicker responded that he had been experimenting with the content of his site at the time that Admiral looked at it, rotating through subjects as diverse as jewellery and photography, music downloads and insurance, and generating different adverts in respect of the changing content.
He said that until he received the complaint he had not been aware of any company using the word elephant as a brand of insurance. His previous communications with Oberwager and Admiral had made no mention of the term. He said that as soon as he knew of the possible infringement he had removed the insurance ads and replaced his original content.
The site, he argued, was therefore being operated in good faith.
Admiral disagreed, producing evidence showing that the site was still generating insurance adverts. On the elephant.com homepage at the time of writing, Google AdSense displays one advert for insurexyz.com, headed "WWF Save the Big Cat" and linking to a page on insurexyz.com's site that promotes pet insurance. Dicker pointed out that he has no control over the ads that Google AdSense displays on his site.
He also argued that Adsense sometimes generates different adverts for the same web page, depending on the internet protocol (IP) address of the person viewing the page, so that UK viewers see different adverts to those from Canada. Dicker had had no idea insurance adverts were being shown in the UK, he said.
Dicker reasoned that if AdSense is linking to competitors of Admiral, that is a matter for Admiral to raise with Google, not him.
The three-man WIPO panel agreed, finding that Admiral had not proved bad faith on the part of Adam Dicker. The panel refused to transfer the domain.
