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By Joey Gardiner, 27 May 2002 17:10

NEWS Global consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has lost an attempt to win back the pwc.com domain name it says is being used by a cybersquatter. An arbitration panel for the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) ruled PwC had failed to prove that the defendant had no legitimate interest in the domain and had registered it in good faith. The ruling came despite WIPO accepting that PwC had registered a number of trademarks around the world covering the acronym. The decision will come as a shock to many, particularly since the usual criticism of WIPO is that it is too pro-big business. The www.pwc.com domain name is currently held by a Hong Kong company called Ultimate Search. The firm claims it buys up domain names to offer them as search results for sport-related companies who pay to be included in the service. In its filings to the WIPO arbitration service, it said PWC is a generically used acronym to refer to personal watercrafts. It added that at the time of PwC's birth - the merging of Price Waterhouse with Coopers and Lybrand in July 1998 - the domain was already being used. PwC said the business had registered the domain in bad faith and had "intentionally misdirected internet users by using the PWC mark". Particularly, it noted Ultimate Search had also registered the domain www.pwc.usglobal.com, similar to the URL of PwC's existing website, www.pwcglobal.com. It said the respondent was "plainly aware of complainant's domain name and email address, has intentionally created and used the nearly identical domain name pwc.usglobal.com to attract internet users by creating a likelihood of confusion with complainant's mark". Nevertheless the the multinational professional services giant still lost the case. The WIPO panel said PwC failed to prove Ultimate Search had no valid interest in the domain, or that it was holding it in bad faith. It also ruled the PWC acronym was not universally distinctive of the company. Dr Jonathan Robinson, business development director at domain name consultancy NetNames, said the decision prompted questions about how WIPO worked. He said: "This is a strange decision. There is a problem with consistency about WIPO's decision-making. "It also looks smacks of complacency here from PwC - on a technical level there seems to be a failure to fully defend their rights to their name." PwC refused to comment on this story.