First, thanks for all the comments and suggestions... this has been truly informative and given me some avenues for thought...
Second, I did spend a good deal of time reading past UDRP cases... They generally only consider trademark if it was registered before the domain was registered. So running to get a trademark after the dispute begins may be helpful, but would probably not sway the UDRP...
Third, one of my biggest problems is that I'm not 100% sure if he actually used the name as a product or not. Yes, I tried Google... Believe it or not, Google does not contain all of the world's knowledge.... They won't have that for at least another 6 months...
Again, thank you to everyone... The lawyer I spoke with would defend a UDRP case (it's all just paperwork, by the way...no real meeting or even phone interview) for about $1000, flat fee. It sounded pretty reasonable to me and I even figured I could probably defend myself if I didn't feel like dropping the grand....
I'm the guy who asked the original question... It looks like the general consensus is "Maybe... maybe not."
I did speak to a lawyer initially who specialized in this sort of thing and he said, "Sure, you'd win in a UDRP case..." Then I thought about it some more and I realized that most lawyers only take cases they *think* they would win. It wouldn't be a guarantee... and I'd hate to have a 6 month old blog with traffic and readers suddenly get ripped awy from me. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way for people who are being bullied to file any sort of counter complaint in matters like these.
The real domains in question are my site (which is down for the moment) http://www.thesimplemillionaire.com/ and his site which is the same, but without the word "the." He couldn't furnish anything saying he had used the site for any more than a link farm, though he did say that he had some magazines sent to the name "simplemillionaire." Nice. I've had magazines sent to my cat, but that doesn't make them taxpayers (hmm...)
The threats from the owner of simplemillionaire.com also detailed how he was going to sue me to pay for HIS legal expenses. Again, I don't know how kosher that sort of threat is. This guy owns a company called SimpleVentures or something which seems to specialize in buying domains and selling them... apparently in a greasy way. His original email to me immediately suggested that I pay him a "licensing fee" for my domain name because it was similar to his. He boasted of selling the domain CapitalManager.com to the Hartford Insurance Group.
All this for a stupid personal blog that was only about three weeks old.
Bottom line: I didn't want to risk spending my next three months fighting with the jerk and dropping a couple grand in legal fees. But I'm keeping the domain name for the moment... You know, just in case...
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Second, I did spend a good deal of time reading past UDRP cases... They generally only consider trademark if it was registered before the domain was registered. So running to get a trademark after the dispute begins may be helpful, but would probably not sway the UDRP...
Third, one of my biggest problems is that I'm not 100% sure if he actually used the name as a product or not. Yes, I tried Google... Believe it or not, Google does not contain all of the world's knowledge.... They won't have that for at least another 6 months...
Again, thank you to everyone... The lawyer I spoke with would defend a UDRP case (it's all just paperwork, by the way...no real meeting or even phone interview) for about $1000, flat fee. It sounded pretty reasonable to me and I even figured I could probably defend myself if I didn't feel like dropping the grand....
I did speak to a lawyer initially who specialized in this sort of thing and he said, "Sure, you'd win in a UDRP case..." Then I thought about it some more and I realized that most lawyers only take cases they *think* they would win. It wouldn't be a guarantee... and I'd hate to have a 6 month old blog with traffic and readers suddenly get ripped awy from me. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way for people who are being bullied to file any sort of counter complaint in matters like these.
The real domains in question are my site (which is down for the moment) http://www.thesimplemillionaire.com/ and his site which is the same, but without the word "the." He couldn't furnish anything saying he had used the site for any more than a link farm, though he did say that he had some magazines sent to the name "simplemillionaire." Nice. I've had magazines sent to my cat, but that doesn't make them taxpayers (hmm...)
The threats from the owner of simplemillionaire.com also detailed how he was going to sue me to pay for HIS legal expenses. Again, I don't know how kosher that sort of threat is. This guy owns a company called SimpleVentures or something which seems to specialize in buying domains and selling them... apparently in a greasy way. His original email to me immediately suggested that I pay him a "licensing fee" for my domain name because it was similar to his. He boasted of selling the domain CapitalManager.com to the Hartford Insurance Group.
All this for a stupid personal blog that was only about three weeks old.
Bottom line: I didn't want to risk spending my next three months fighting with the jerk and dropping a couple grand in legal fees. But I'm keeping the domain name for the moment... You know, just in case...
Yes, I was using GoDaddy... Sue me. Wait, don't.