Nevada court ruled to “remove” hundreds of sites from the Internet

Chanel, the manufacturer of handbags, shoes, and other luxury goods, has won a lawsuit against 229 counterfeit product distribution sites that advertise their services through Google and Facebook. As a result, the Nevada state court agreed that Chanel has the right to seize the defendants' domain names and transfer them to the GoDaddy registrar ( court order ). The court also ordered “all search sites” and “all social media sites” - in particular, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google — to “de-index” the content of these 229 sites and remove them from any search results.

This lawsuit is notable for several reasons. It is interesting that Chanel did not sue specific manufacturers, but filed a “one-sided” request with a list of several hundred domain names. No one bothers to fill up this list in the future and close a couple of hundred sites “to the heap”. The latest court ruling on November 14 affects 229 domain names. None of these sites were notified and the owners did not have a chance to defend themselves - they did not even know about the lawsuit until the verdict was announced and they did not receive a decision to seize the domain name.

To obtain the evidence base, Chanel hired a private detective who made a trial purchase at three of 229 sites. Experts evaluated the purchased products and recognized them as counterfeit. All other 226 sites were recognized as “similar” without a test purchase.

Among the sites that are “seized” are those that are registered outside the United States. For example, the poshmoda.ws domain is registered by a German registrar and is not required to comply with a US court decision, although most domains are located in .com and .net zones.

How they will remove content from the index of search engines is generally a special question.

The question is, why do we need to pass additional laws if SOPA de facto works in the current system. The entire online community fight against SOPA may not make any sense. Without new laws, the Nevada state court is absolutely sure that it can “remove sites from the Internet” - either it does not understand the global nature of the World Wide Web, or considers itself to be the navel of the Earth, which rules the world?

via Technology & Marketing Law Blog