Chanel Wins Court Order In US To Transfer Domains And More

A US judge has granted Chanel a massive win in a case where the luxury goods company was trying to put sites selling counterfeit products out of business. There are some issues with the court ruling though that some people will find disturbing. The judge granted Chanel the right to seize and transfer access of domains from counterfeit sellers to GoDaddy into Chanel's name.

The court ruling even goes so far as to order search engines like Google and others to remove listings to the sites from search results and has ordered social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to remove any references to the sites as well. The big problem with the ruling to me is that the courts have apparently allowed Chanel to conduct the investigation. The courts also allegedly gave the sites using the seized domains no chance to dispute the claims made by Chanel before the domains were seized.

Apparently, an investigator Chanel hired conducted the investigation and 228 sites were named in the initial round of seizure requests. The astonishing part is that apparently only three of those 228 sites were actually physically investigated by ordered suspected fake products to determine if they were in fact counterfeit. The other domains were just seized based on web browsing.

[via ArsTechnica]