TribalWars loses to BuyDomains in dispute over TribalWars.com

The MMORPG TribalWars lost a lawsuit over the domain name TribalWars.com, which is owned by BuyDomains. InnoGames, the game's creator, filed the dispute at the World Intellectual Property Forum in January.

The arbitration panel ruled that the domain name was not registered in bad faith because it was acquired before TribalWars.

The arbitral panel relied on the following arguments in reaching its decision:

- according to the registration policy, only those domains can be registered and maintained that, at the time of registration, consisted of common words or phrases, abbreviations, and to which no one has exclusive rights;

The company regularly checks domain names for conflicts with trademarks and other proprietary rights. When BuyDomains acquired this domain name, a check revealed that "tribalwars" was available.

- Robots.txt performs a search to avoid any chance of domains appearing next to similar domains in Google.

also produced evidence from to refute some arguments.

BuyDomains also presented some evidence from Domain Tools to refute some of the arguments.