Nevada court decided to "withdraw" hundreds of sites from the Internet

The manufacturer of women's handbags, shoes and other luxury goods, the company Chanel, won the lawsuit against 229 sites-distributors of counterfeit products, which advertise their services through Google and Facebook. As a result, the Nevada State Court agreed that Chanel has the right to take the domain names of the defendants and transfer them to the possession of the GoDaddy registrar ( court order ). The court also ruled "all search sites" and "all social media sites" - in particular, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo and Google are mentioned - to "de-index" the data content of 229 sites and remove them from any search results.

This trial is notable for several reasons. Interestingly, Chanel did not sue specific manufacturers, but appealed to the court with a “one-sided” request, indicating a list of several hundred domain names. In the future, no one bothers to fill this list and close “to the heap” a couple of hundred more sites. The latest court decision on November 14 involves 229 domain names. None of these sites was notified and the owners had no chance to speak in their defense - they did not even know about the trial until the verdict was announced and they did not receive a decree on the withdrawal of the domain name.

To obtain an evidence base, Chanel hired a private detective who made a trial purchase on three of 229 sites. Experts rated the purchased products and recognized it as counterfeit. All other 226 sites were considered “similar” without a test purchase.
')
Among the sites decided to “seize” there are some that are registered outside the United States. For example, the domain poshmoda.ws is registered by the German registrar and is not obliged to comply with the decision of the US court, although most of the domains are in the .com and .net zones.

How they will withdraw content from the search engine index is generally a special question.

The question is, why should additional laws be adopted if SOPA is de facto working in the current system. The whole struggle of the Internet community against SOPA may not make any sense. Without the new laws, the court of the state of Nevada is quite sure that it can “withdraw websites from the Internet” - either it does not understand the global nature of the World Wide Web, or it considers itself the navel of the Earth, which rules the world?

via Technology & Marketing Law Blog