TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — An arbitrator last week, ruling in a cybersquatting case, has ordered the domain name Clips4Free.cc transferred to the company that operates Clips4Sale.com.
The operator of Clips4Free.cc merely incorporated a variation of Clips4Sale’s trademark by merely substituting “sale” with “free” and adding the “.cc” TLD, arbitrator Sandra Franklin ruled.
Clips4Free.cc even included the colors and borrowed style of Clips4Sale.com, which for years has offered millions of fetish and amateur porn video by the clip and is owned by Wiluna Holdings LLC.
In the cybersquatting scheme, the operator of Clips4Free.cc, Venture i. S.A, marketed free adult content on the site, but users were required to obtain a premium membership to file-locker site FileBoom.me at a cost of $32.95 for three months. At post time, the site has not yet technically been transferred.
The case, decided at the National Arbitration Forum, is the second recent win over cybersquatting websites for Wiluna Holdings.
Last week, Wiluna Holdings received an arbitrator’s approval to take over the Lips4Sale.com domain, whose operators, Transcom Ltd., merely deleted the letter “c” from the beginning of the word “clips” in the domain name.
In both cases, Wiluna Holdings alleged the domains were confusingly similar to its own, were registered in bad faith and that its operators had no rights to them.