Little Caprice Wins Case Against Cybersquatters (XBIZ)

Read the full article by Rhett Pardon at xbiz.com

MELBOURNE — An arbitrator recently ordered the transfer of a pair of domain names — LittleCaprice.com and LittleCaprice.net — to adult model Little Caprice, who contended in her claim that the operators of the sites had been infringing on her trademark. The claim, however, was much more complex than garden-variety cybersquatting cases — while Little Caprice has held a trademark for her stage name for just one year, the website operators who started marketing LittleCaprice.com and LittleCaprice.net began marketing the sites about 10 years ago. And, they claimed to have a 100-year license to publish her content. According to the recent WIPO decision, the respondents in the case, Dmitriy Pyatnitca and Dmytro Pyatnytsya of ZiboSoftware SRO in Prague, registered the pair of domains in 2008, long before Little Caprice registered her European trademark for the name but only shortly after she started using the stage name.