A Top 10 Dispute in China

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Hogan Lovells

China Business Law Journal has recently announced its ‘Deals of the Year 2016’ recognizing cases that saw the most sophisticated efforts by legal counsel. And as a result our work for Tencent has been recognized as one of the Top 10 Dispute Deals of the Year and the only domain name case on the list.

Hogan Lovells’ team led by Hong Kong partner Eugene Low, represented Tencent, in a challenging and complex dispute, relating to the recuperation of an important domain name. Our team won back the domain name for WeChat, Tencent’s popular social network app, under the uniform domain name dispute resolution policy (UDRP). The domain name involved is “weixin.com”, with “weixin” being the Mandarin transliteration of the WeChat’s original Chinese name.

It was not an easy case. Under the UDRP, Tencent was required to prove bad faith in the registration and use of the domain name by the registrant, but this was not straightforward because the domain name was registered in 2000, long before Tencent launched WeChat in 2011. We overcame this difficulty by tracking down the domain name transfer history. With sufficient evidence of the transfer of the domain name, we were able to convince the UDRP panel that the subsequent transfer – rather than the initial registration of the domain name – was carried out in bad faith in order to take advantage of the popularity of WeChat in China, and throughout the world.

This was an important victory for our client as the WeChat name is incredibly valuable to Tencent’s brand portfolio. In 2016, WeChat registered over 700 million active users every month making it one of the most used messaging apps in the world.

DISCLAIMER: Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.

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