TURKEY
DOMAIN NAME BATTLES IN TURKEY
Idil Buse Kök and Ayça Pinar Eren Yaar Ankara Patent Bureau
In 2010, one of our clients, DTV Haber Ve Görsel Yayıncılık Anonim Şirketi, applied for a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Procedure (UDRP, ICANN’s administrative procedure) before the World Intellectual Property Organization against the registrant of the domain name
www.kanald.com.
Our client is the owner of the following trademarks which were registered before the Turkish Patent Institute (TPI): ‘kanal d d device’ from August 1998, ‘kanal d hd’ from August 2006, ‘kanal d high defi nition’ from August 2006, and ‘kanal d home video’ from January 2007. In addition to the trademark registrations, our client has been the registrant of the domain name
www.kanald.com.tr since 1996, and it has been actively used since that date.
Our client’s TV channel Kanal D has introduced a distinct approach to television broadcasting in Turkey. According to the Nielsen Audience Measurement data for 2011, Kanal D is Turkey’s most widely watched channel with an average prime time audience share of 19.8 percent among all viewers. Our client’s ‘Kanal D’ is a very well-known trademark in Turkey.
T e disputed domain name
www.kanald.com is exactly the same as our client’s registered trademarks. Even though it was registered in 1997, the related domain name was not used eff ectively until 2008, when the party started to use the disputed domain name as an online dating website. Signifi cantly, it uses our client’s ‘Kanal D’ trademark. We claimed that the infringement started in 2008 rather than 1997 and continues to this date. Further, the other party acted in bad faith while registering the disputed domain name in 1997 as our client’s reputation dates back to 1996.
Against our complaint, the other party claimed that it provides a diff erent service when compared to our client’s sector. It also claimed that
the
domain name was ‘kanald’, while and our client’s registered trademark was ‘Kanal D’, with a space between kanal and d. Accordingly, the other party claimed these expressions are not the same as or similar to each other. In
108 World Intellectual Property Review e-Digest 2013
THE UDRP PANEL CAME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT WE HAD FAILED TO PROVE THAT THE DISPUTED DOMAIN NAME WAS REGISTERED AND IS BEING USED IN BAD FAITH.
addition to that, it claimed that the generic term ‘kanal’ stands for ‘channel’ or ‘chat room’ and the letter ‘d’ is an abbreviation of the world ‘dostluk’ (which means friendship in Turkish), and designates a friendship channel under the disputed domain name.
A three-member UDRP panel, comprising two foreign members and one Turkish member, reviewed the trademark certifi cates and found that the wording ‘Kanal D’ had to be considered as the most distinctive element
www.worldipreview.com
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