GENEVA—The parent company of Penthouse was handed a legal victory Tuesday over a foreign intellectual property (IP) rights infringer.
United Nations specialized agency the World Intellectual Property Organization, through a single-person panel of the agency's Arbitration and Mediation Center, found that Penthouse World Media LLC had its IP violated due to an "identical or confusingly similar" domain name not owned by the company.
"The disputed domain name is confusingly similar to the registered trademark in which the complainant has rights," sole panelist Simone Huser stated in the ruling. Huser refers to the infringing domain, penthousemagz.com. The domain was registered through domain registrar Hello.co Internet Corp., based in New York. The party that registered the infringing domain is an entity from Uganda called Boys Wow.
"By diverting Internet users away from the Complainant’s official website to its own site for commercial gain, the Respondent is using the disputed domain name in bad faith," Huser added.
Huser ruled in favor of Penthouse and ordered the infringing domain to be transferred to the storied adult publisher's parent company.
Corey Silverstein, the attorney for Penthouse in this matter, told AVN he was pleased with the decision by the WIPO panel.
"This decision sends a clear message: if you try to hijack the Penthouse brand, you will lose," Silverstein said. "The respondent blatantly copied Penthouse’s name, logo and content to deceive users and siphon traffic for profit—classic bad-faith conduct that the panel had no trouble shutting down."
He added, "Penthouse will not tolerate impersonation, piracy or domain abuse in any form."
