Colombian Firm Loses UDRP Case After Failed Attempt to Seize pasar.com Via Reverse Hijacking

A WIPO panelist has found Agencia de Aduanas Pasar Ltda., a Colombian logistics company, guilty of reverse domain name hijacking after the firm tried to seize pasar.com through a UDRP complaint. According to Domain Name Wire, the case hinged on one inconvenient fact: the domain was registered in 1999, more than two decades before the complainant filed its trademarks in 2022.

Why this matters if you hold common-word inventory

The disputed domain was registered in 1999 by Ming K Chow, who has held it ever since. Panelist Matthew Kennedy emphasized that "pasar" is a common Spanish word meaning "to pass," and also translates to "market" in Indonesian — a generic dictionary term with multiple legitimate meanings. When a domain is a common word with a clean registration history, the complainant has to build bad-faith intent from scratch, and Kennedy found they couldn't do it.

The logistics company operates its business at PasarLtda.com, not pasar.com, which tells you exactly what the complaint was really about. They didn't need the domain for operations — they wanted the shorter, more valuable asset and tried to use the UDRP as an end run around the open market. That's not what the policy is for, and panels have gotten increasingly blunt about saying so. Kennedy wrote that the complainant clearly "feels that it would make better use of the disputed domain name than the Respondent is making of it, but that is no basis for a UDRP complaint."

What I'd file away if it's ever your name on the complaint

I see this pattern more often than people realize: a trademark holder discovers a domain they'd rather own, files a complaint without doing the math on dates and prior rights, and walks away with a public RDNH finding that complicates every future dispute they bring. The complainant here had legal counsel — Muñoz Abogados S.A.S. — and still couldn't construct a plausible bad-faith argument. A 23-year gap between registration and trademark filing, combined with a generic word, is a combination no panelist is going to overlook.

If you hold a common-word domain or anything registered well before the complainant's trademark date, this is a case I'd save in your own reference folder. Don't panic when a complaint lands. A clean registration date, demonstrable good-faith use, and a dictionary-word argument are your strongest defenses, and decisions like this one give you language to cite back to the panel. Kennedy wrote that the complainant "knew that the Complaint as presented could not succeed on any reasonable interpretation of the Policy," and that's exactly the kind of reasoning you want behind you if you're ever forced to defend a name you've held for decades.

The cost of defending is real — your time, and if you hire counsel, your cash — but losing on the merits to a properly-argued RDNH case is rarer than the complaint volume might suggest. The respondent here represented himself and still won. That's the takeaway I'd hold onto whenever someone with a fresh trademark and a long-standing generic domain decides your asset looks better in their portfolio than yours.