AAA gets hands on AAA.net. But it is overstepping its bounds.
American Automobile Association (AAA) has been awarded the domain name AAA.net after filing a lawsuit against its owners. AAA had lost a UDRP arbitration at National Arbitration Forum for the domain name, and then sued the owners of the domain in U.S. District Court, Western District of Pennsylvania.
The National Arbitration Forum got it right — but in this case the defendants’ behavior with other domains made it tough to defend in the court system. AAA noted several other domain names that the defendants had to cough up through UDRP, including Polaroid.net, RadissonSeattle.com, and Micorosft.com.
AAA.net is a generic term and appeared to be used that way in this case; but ultimately it seems that the defendants felt it worthwhile to hand over the domain rather than engage in a long lawsuit.
AAA has been on an arbitration domain name land grab lately, picking up domain names that probably have little value to it and have questionable similarity to AAA, such as adult names.
The company recently won disputes for aaaerotica.com, aaanudes.com, and aaablondes.com, which makes you question if the organization has filed a trademark in the field of use of adult entertainment. It also snagged aaabailbond.us. I suppose AAA may be planning a major expansion of services.
This month AAA also won aaa-major-creditcardsonline.com, a credit card site that has nothing to do with the Association. Sure, AAA offers a branded credit card, but that doesn’t entitle it to any domain name that includes AAA and credit cards, since AAA is a common term used by many businesses. You can also question the value of adding this domain name to its portfolio — was the web site really causing a problem for the association?
source DomainNameWire.com