Aston Martin wins court battle for .ai domain name
To many, the Aston Martin brand is as quintessentially British as its most famous secret service owner of the DB5.
But a decision by an American entrepreneur to buy the domain name and base it on the Caribbean island of Anguilla has triggered a protracted legal battle that bizarrely focused on artificial intelligence.
A company called DNS Admin, Kindpedia bought the internet name astonmartin.ai last year and put it up for sale the very next day.
The island of Anguilla, which uses the .ai country code ending for its local domain names, has seen a flurry of internet name registrations in recent years as artificial intelligence, or AI, has become increasingly popular and important as a brand.
In July, lawyers acting for Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd lodged a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) claiming the site had been set up in “bad faith” and was “confusingly similar” or “identical” to its own brand.
The subsequent WIPO ruling published last month described Aston Martin as a “worldwide luxury sports car brand with more than a century of history,” adding how its vehicles have “featured in numerous James Bond blockbuster movies from Goldfinger in 1964 to No Time to Die in 2021”.
It added how the company has a variety of trademarks in both Europe and the USA.
In contrast, the ruling says “very little is known” about DNS Admin, Kindpedia, which obtained the domain name, “except that it is apparently located in the United States.”
The panel hearing the case heard claims by the American that it had been “blindsided” by Aston Martin in a “Machiavellian manoeuvre” to obtain the domain name which he had bought.
DNS Admin, Kindpedia insisted that Aston Martin had “failed to establish any exclusive rights to the use of the domain name within the realm of artificial intelligence”.
But, the WIPO panel expressed concerns that the American businessman was “capitalising” on Aston Martin’s trademark and did not plan to use the domain name, but merely sell it on. They concluded the domain name was almost identical to the Aston Martin brand and had been set up in bad faith.
They added that the unnamed American man who bought it “could not reasonably have been unaware of the Aston Martin trademark when it registered the disputed domain name.”
WIPO ordered the domain name be transferred to Aston Martin.
An Aston Martin spokesman said: “As an iconic ultra-luxury brand globally recognised for its high-performance engineering, craftsmanship and innovative design, Aston Martin will take all necessary steps to protect its intellectual property.”
