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The German producer of a popular device used to vaporize marijuana is claiming a North American dealer is bogarting its domain names.
But the World Intellectual Property Organization on Thursday sided against Storz & Bickel, the maker of the Volcano Vaporizer, ruling that MSI Imports' four dozen Volcano-related domains aren't treading on Storz & Bickel's trademarks.
Storz & Bickel dropped its distribution deal in December with the Washington State reseller of the $500-plus gadget that provides smokers clean and nearly weightless hits of vaporized marijuana or other substances.
MSI Imports spent $7,000 in 2008 for volcanovaporizer.com and paid thousands more for about four-dozen related domain names. The WIPO dispute resolution panel found that MSI Imports did not register the domains in bad faith, and that Storz & Bickel were aware for years of MSI's domain names.
Storz & Bickel claimed the domain names were "confusingly similar" to its German and U.S. trademarks because they contain its Volcano trademark and additional "generic terms" such as "vaporizer," "vape," "classic" and "digital."
MSI Imports, for its part, claimed that Storz & Bickel "was quite content" with a business relationship in which MSI Imports funded the cost of registering and acquiring the disputed domain names "in order to drive internet traffic to MSI Imports' websites and generate more sales for Storz & Bickel."
