According to sfgate.com, A Federal Court in New York just awarded Hermes International $100 million dollars in damages against 34 websites that sold fake copies of its goods.
The fake goods were for “at least nine Hermes products including Birkin and Kelly handbags, wallets, watches, belts and jewelry”.
Some of the websites were:
HermesBags- Outlet.net
HermesBirkin-Bags.org
HermesOutletStore.Com
“If plaintiffs discover new domain names registered by the defendants containing one or more of the Hermes trademarks or marks confusingly similar thereto plaintiffs may bring the additional infringing domain names to the court’s attention,” Cote said.
The court also ordered that any money held by PayPal Inc. to be given to Hermes and ordered Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and merchant account providers, as well as third-party processors and search engines including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s Bing and Yahoo! Inc., to immediately stop providing services to the defendants or links to their sites.
The judge also directed social media companies including Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to “de-index” and remove from any search pages links to the infringing defendants.
The order to the search engines and to the social networking companies to de-index the sites is an interesting one.
The case is Hermes International v. John Doe, 12-CV-1623, Southern District of New York.
Ouch…that’ll leave a mark.
good luck in collecting the 100 million.
the notion of “de-indexing” is strange, imo. it shows a peculiar understanding about how the web works… as if all the web must be accessed through search engines or social media sites. targetting the isp makes more sense, but couldn’t defendants just move to a new isp?
and how are they going to collect their 100 million dollar judgment from “john doe”? did “john doe” even show up to court?
if they knew who “john doe” was, then presumably they could shut him down directly, without having to try and cut off his all his “enablers”.
Most interesting is that they did not also go after the actual domain names themselves… why not?
Domain name transactions for Lolita Global Co,Ltd, their company has many valuable domain name
I’m all in favor of enforcing intellectual property laws and going after people selling knockoffs.
At the same time, when I see people paying thousands(!) of dollars for a designer handbag, I shake my head.
P.S. I just did a Google search involving Hermes, and most of the top-ranking results were scammy, keyword-stuffing sites selling things like “high quality replica” Hermes bags. Looks like the court’s work is far from done.
Hermes got the domains as well
seems they did, yes… article mentions nothing in that regard.
In that case though, it is pointless for all the exercise of trying to force 3rd party companies to “de-list, de-index, etc” since they already have the target domains.
the “John Does” who operated the domain names/websites were apparently identified by the PayPal accounts they used for their transactions. When this Court granted this Judgement, any money in any of those PayPal accounts are frozen and given to Hermes.
Even if it’s a relatively small amount, this forces counterfeiters off of PayPal, making their payment processing more difficult. I am sure Hermes won’t collect much of the $100M, but it’s more about deterrence.
The more interesting aspect of this decision is that the injunction can be served on any third parties (such as ISP’s) who are prohibited from doing further business with these folks
Interesting. Thanks for that, HappyGilmore.