BURBANK, Calif. — MyDirtyHobby recently scored a big victory against operators of five sites who incorporated its brand name into their adult-site addresses.
As a result of the victory before a WIPO arbitrator, all five domains were ordered transferred and now resolve to the MyDirtyHobby.com and MyDirtyHobby.de addresses.
MyDirtyHobby, a globally marketed site but particularly popular in Germany, allows both users and performers to interact with each other through private messages and instant messaging. The performers on MyDirtyHobby are mostly amateur and cam models.
The URLS involved in the cybersquatting case included MyDirtyHobby.me, MyDirtyHobby-Moviez.com, Stream-MyDirtyHobby.biz, Stream-MyDirtyHobby.me and StreamYourDirtyHobby.com.
All of the sites were found to offer competing adult entertainment content, according to the ruling
In the consolidated case, involving three different operators of the squatting sites, a panelist said that each of the five domain names were confusingly similar to the MyDirtyHobby trademark, that the domain holders did not have any rights to the domains and that the domain names all were registered in bad faith.
“We have been working with MyDirtyHobby on many cases in which this required us to escalated via UDRP,” Adan McManus, SafeNames.net brand protection manager, told XBIZ. “Following our previous successes, we have been able to send ripples in the cybersquatting world and set a precedent for the brand through such UDRP action and procedures.
“These actions for brands go a long way to prevent them being targets and with our monitoring services, can be flagged before damages are too great,” he said.
“We are happy the results went as predicted and know this will send a message to cybersquatters.”