GENEVA — The Administrative Panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)’s Arbitration and Mediation Center issued two recent decisions in favor of Chaturbate’s parent company in cybersquatting actions against parties exploiting similarly named domains.
The WIPO panel’s decisions, dated June 25 and July 10, found “that the finding that a respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in a disputed domain name can lead, in appropriate circumstances, to a finding of registration of a disputed domain name in bad faith.”
“The circumstance of the present case, in which the Panel is convinced that the Complainant's Chaturbate trademark was deliberately appropriated in the disputed domain name, are such that the Panel concludes that a finding of registration in bad faith is justified," the panel found.
By the decision, Chaturbate was awarded the disputed domains “chaturbatemodel.net” and “chaturbatevideos.net.”
The owners of Chaturbate.com, represented by the Walters Law Group, established they had been using the trademark in commerce since 2011 and have it registered since 2013.
“These two sites were notorious infringers that published pirated webcam shows from our client’s site," Walters Law Group's Larry Walters told XBIZ. "Chaturbate will continue enforcing its intellectual property rights and protecting its valuable brand.”
