Yet another blow for Oasis Stores

Previously troubled high street clothing chain Oasis Stores has seemingly received yet another blow to their fortunes this week as the internet domain name Oasis.co.uk - which they previously had successfully won via a domain name dispute (DRS) brought about through UK internet names governing body Nominet’s dispute resolution service - was this week returned to the previous owner on appeal.

Well respected blogger Julia MacKenzie has announced today the details of the case - which as yet are unavailable from Nominet.

Seemingly, the oasis.co.uk appeal overturn has some striking material facts that may set certain precedences in future domain name disputes. Least of all because the respondent was allowed to submit additional evidence at appeal which is against the rules as set out by nominet. The respondent was also given a mere “slap on the wrist” for failing to maintain accurate contact records. Both of which are usually grounds enough in order for a domain owner to lose the rights to a domain name or, in this case, for an appeal hearing to be dismissed.

Seemingly the appeal panel found “in the interests of justice” that Oasis Stores had deliberately manufactured the claim (or at least did not protest strongly enough) against the claim of the respondent that they had deliberately engineered the showing of their advertisements on the respondents web site. The appeal panel also made the unprecedented step of making certain discoveries themselves which included visiting the source code of the Oasis-stores.com website and found incriminating evidence - as Ms MacKenzie called it, their “smoking gun”.

From the article on Ms Mackenzie’s site pertaining to be a direct quote of the appeal panels’ decision they say “The Complainant is itself seeking to use the domain names oasis.co.uk and oasis.com to attract traffic to its own site. domain names which it does not own”.

Oasis Stores was recently bought by Aurora Fashions from the troubled Mosaic Group.