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Virgin Enterprises has successfully had a .club domain name containing its trademark suspended and transferred.
The National Arbitration Forum ruled on December 8 that the virginamerica.club address was registered in bad faith by Sheng Wang of Beijing, China. The website at the domain name contains a series of sponsored links.
The ‘Virgin America’ trademark was registered by Virgin with the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2008, relating to air travel. Another two ‘Virgin America’ trademarks were registered in 2013, relating to online retail and jewellery.
Virgin is well-known for protecting its trademarks, and according to Bloomberg, the company has opposed at least 64 trademark registrations.
The .club generic top-level domain (gTLD) is one of the new batch of web suffixes released this year. At the time of writing it is the third most popular gTLD, with around 151,000 registrations.
Virgin did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Virgin Enterprises Limited; gTLD; trademark infringement; .club
