Nominative Use of SelectQuote

    A principle of U.S. trademark law is nominative use of a trademark.  This means that a non-owner of a trademark may use the trademark to refer to a product or service.  This was first stated by the U. S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, Inc.  The case in question dealt with a survey run by a magazine entitled the New Kids on the Block survey.  The court found that there was no easy way to refer to New Kids on the Block without using the trademark.
    The elements of such a defense are as follows:

1. The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute).
2. The user only uses as much of the mark as is necessary for the identification (e.g. the words but not the font or symbol).
3. The user does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder.

   If these elements are present, the use is not a trademark use, and no dilution can occur.  So, it is possible to criticize a trademark holder, while referring to them with their mark.  You may be hurting their reputation, but you are not diluting the mark.
    You can probably see where I'm going with this.  My use of the SelectQuote trademark is clearly nominative fair use.  Noncommercial fair use of a trademark is another possible defense to their complaint.  Even if the arbiter decides that selectquotereview is confusingly similar to selectquote, I must still be shown to be making bad faith use of the domain.  As I'm not trying to sell them the domain, and it is clearly not typo-squatting (this term is incorrectly defined by the complainant), they must somehow convince the arbiter that I'm a competitor or that I'm making bad faith use of the mark.


   This makes SelectQuote's choice of precedents in their domain dispute with me even more suspect.  The domain electroluxrefridgeratorreviews was awarded to Electrolux after the Respondant failed to respond to the complaint in a WIPO hearing.  This raises the question of what choice of law did the WIPO panel use.  Since Electrolux is a Swedish company the panel may have chosen to ignore the Ninth Circuits reasoning on the issue.  In any case, the lack of response and the use of sponsored links in that case hurt the respondent.  It appears the WIPO panel failed to even consider nominative use.   
    Thus, a far more applicable precedent is Glenn Beck's WIPO challenge to glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com .  The respondent asserted nominative fair use, and the WIPO panel found in his favor.  The respondent even had links to commercial sites at odds with Beck, which made the noncommercial fair use defense harder to apply.  My lack of commercial interest, and links to competitors, should make for a lower bar in my case.  It is clear that SelectQuote is confusing commercial tarnishment doctrine with reporting of true facts which are uncomfortable to them.