Who says fashion had only style and no brains? Look at Chanel now. They have just about had it with counterfeit products the world being sold through bogus sites and they took to investigating the matter and taking it to court. And they won. They won court orders against hundreds of websites trafficking in counterfeit luxury goods. Chanel can now seize domain names and transfer them to US-based registrar GoDaddy. Also, all Internet search engines and all social media websites namely Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google were ordered to de-index the domain names and to remove them from any search results. The sites were investigated through a detailed plan. The company hired a Nevada investigator to order from three of 228 doubtful sites. The orders were reported counterfeit and this allowed the judge to pass his orders. However, ordering the search engines and social networks sites to de-index raises another concern. The domain could be from anywhere in the world and not particularly only from the US. Other lawyers are also concerned that the Stop Online Piracy Act, under which this case falls, may hence not entirely be productive in the long run as ‘miscreants’ could always use domains that escape the scanner.
