What A French Stink!!!!

Chanel Ordered Domain Seizures

During the fight against sites trafficking in counterfeit luxury products Chanel somehow managed to convince the court that it should have the authority to seize as many as 700 domain names.
The perfume overlord has filed a joint lawsuit in Nevada against almost 200 domain names that turned out to have nearly nothing in common. As a result, the court allowed the company to take them down. Moreover, it also allows Chanel to add new names to the list and seize them as well.
In fact, the court order allows the company to take control of any online location without even having to prove anything. In other words, no site identified by Chanel has a right of appeal. The services won’t be allowed to contest it either. Meanwhile, the standard of evidence that the company has needed thus far has been top of the range. Chanel hired a Nevada investigator to order from 3 of the 228 websites in question. After the orders had arrived, they were reviewed by the company’s official and declared counterfeit, while the rest of the sites were closed down on the say so of the company’s anti-counterfeiting specialist surfing the Internet.
Local judge ruled that evidence was enough and ordered the domain names seized and transferred to GoDaddy. There the domain will redirect to a page with a seizure notice. In addition, the judge ordered search engine indexing, which neither Google nor Bing have complied with so far. Still, it seems that the court didn’t realize that the websites may even be registered outside the United States, thus making a ban worldwide. Indeed, it turned out that the list of offending domains contains poshmoda.ws – a domain registered in Germany.
Although Germany didn’t hand over sovereignty (except for a bunch of war criminals that helped put the United States onto the moon) and the German registrar hasn’t yet complied with the American court order, it still might be possible. As you might remember, the government of the United States has made similar domain name seizures during “Operation In Our Sites” campaign. That time they seized domains both from the US and abroad.
American attorney have already pointed out that if someone could appeal the court decision in any other place, they’d certainly win. However, no average German website would manage to defend itself in the Texas court. Worse still, copyright owners have asked the Congress to write provisions into legislation that allows them to carry out similar events legally.