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Tourism Tasmania has lost its bid to secure the rights to a domain name currently being used to criticise the Tasmanian Government's forestry policy.
Tourism Tasmania, a body corporate owned by the Tasmanian State Government, launched the action under the Australian Domain Resolution Policy (AU DRP) against Tasmanian resident Gordon Craven, over the domain name discover-tasmania.com.au.
Craven was using the disputed domain name as "A Directory to assist people in discovering environmental issues across Tasmania and to assist in the ending of clear-felling of old growth forests in Tasmania, coupled with the facilitation of the marketing of environmentally sustainable products, services and businesses of Tasmania," according to the mission statement on the site. There is also link to a Web site with more explicit images of the impact of forestry practices, discover-tasmania.com.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center, which provides domain name dispute resolution services, ruled that Craven had not registered the domain name in bad faith, despite similar names (discovertasmania.com.au and discovertasmania.com) being operated by Tourism Tasmania. The phrase "Discover Tasmania" was found in the Web page titles of all these pages.
WIPO determined that the disputed domain name was not identical or confusingly similar to Tourism Tasmania's trademark, "TASMANIA Discover your natural state (with image)".
However, WIPO also refused Craven's request to find Tourism Tasmania guilty of "reverse domain name hijacking", which is defined as "using the policy in bad faith to attempt to deprive a registered domain-name holder of a domain name".
WIPO concluded that although there was some reason to believe Tourism Australia knew its case was weak, "it cannot be said that it has acted unjustifiably or in bad faith in making these allegations against the Respondent".