The company attempted reverse domain hijacking of the domain in 2017.
Yoga apparel company Alo LLC Residual assets Cybersquatting lawsuit to acquire domain name alo.com (pdf).
This is the company’s second attempt to upgrade its domain name through legal means: in 2017, the company filed a cybersquatting dispute under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).
The lawsuit was unsuccessful, with the review board finding it to be a bad faith claim because the domain was registered long before the clothing company existed.
In a lawsuit filed this week, the company argues that subsequent malicious use of the domain name warrants a lawsuit.
In this lawsuit, Alo does not allege that the Defendant Domain Names were registered with the intent to utilize Alo’s trademarks when they were originally created, and Alo did not know until recently that the Defendant Domain Names were being used to infringe Alo’s intellectual property rights. However, the circumstances surrounding the current use and registration of the Defendant Domain Names make this lawsuit necessary.
The company claims that the domain is homed to ads related to Alo and its competitors.
Although the company claims that the domain was recently “registered,” Whois records strongly suggest that the current registrant is the same person who filed the UDRP complaint in 2017.
Assuming the ownership is the same, this appears to be more of a trademark dispute than a cybersquatting case.
David Weslow of Wiley Rein is representing the yoga makers. In the last UDRP dispute, ESQwire.com represented the domain name holder.
