Aubade, a French lingerie designer came up with a captivating and eye-catching marketing campaign that has created a buzz, far beyond the Parisian street where it started. For ten days, a lingerie model danced and pranced in front of a lit up curtain just above street level to attract the attention of the curious who passed by the Paris street below.

On the tenth day, the lovely lady revealed herself and pulled across a second curtain, with the visible domain name, FrenchArtofLoving.com. It seems that people *voyeurs* stood on the street with cameras and video cameras to record this fantasy turned reality.

The French Art of Loving website is almost equally captivating. There is an interactive boudoir, and people can click on the dresser drawers to reveal what is in each. IMO, this is a great campaign, and you should see the video and check out their website.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization website’s list of pending UDRP filings, Inter-Continental Hotels Corporation / Six Continents Hotels, Inc. filed a UDRP for 1,529 domain names that they believe infringe on some of their hotel brands. Names such as candlewood-braintree.com, holiday-inn-dfw-north.com, los-angeles-commerce-casino.com, and staybridge-bwi-airport.com were registered by what appears to be one party, Unister GmbH (although I only searched a random assortment of these domain names).

It appears that many of these domain name I searched were registered recently – in mid to late 2009. For example, staybridge-suites-reno.com was registered July 21, 2009, hotel-indigo-london-paddington.com was registered May 23, 2009, and holiday-memphis-hacks.com was registered July 21, 2009.

To possibly make a defense even more difficult for the domain registrant, it appears that some of the names I searched are listed for sale at Sedo (holiday-inn-universal-studios.com for example), and I would think the Complainant could allege this to be a sign of bad faith.

The names I searched all appear to have a hotel booking engine on them, and when dates of stay are entered into the appropriate fields, visitors are redirected to HotelReservation.com, which appears to be owned by the entity that owns the other domain names I searched.

I can never predict what a UDRP panel is going to decide, but if the panel awards all of the domain names to the Complainant, that could mean a loss of upwards of $11,000 assuming a registration cost of $7.25. Ouch.