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Popup King fined

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mole

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Porn 'Mousetrapper' Ordered To Pay Back Over $1.8 Mil
[Financial Times Limited, All Rights Reserved]
Asia Intelligence Wire via NewsEdge Corporation : Steven Bonisteel, Newsbytes 05/28/2002

A federal court has ordered a Pennsylvania man to pay back more than $1.8 million he may have garnered by luring unsuspecting Web surfers to pornography-related Web sites and then trapping them in barrages of pop-up advertising.

John Zuccarini, who usually gives an address in Andalusia, Pa., and who is already one of the Internet's most notorious cybersquatters, was ordered to permanently refrain from diverting or obstructing consumers and to give up $1,897,166 in revenue from the advertising affiliate programs that had paid him for the hits generated by his Web-page mousetraps.

In October of last year, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania had issued a preliminary injunction with similar prohibitions on Zuccarini's activities, but the man has proved to be a difficult target for authorities.

The permanent injunction issued last week in the lawsuit launched by the Federal Trade Commission specifically prohibits Zuccarini from creating Web pages which launch the pages on other sites without permission.

From the UN-backed World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva - which helps arbitrate domain-name disputes for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - to courtrooms across the U.S., Zuccarini may have done more than any other single individual to define Internet cybersquatting.

His companies - variously called Cupcake Party, Cupcake Patrol, Cupcake City, Country Walk, and more - have been behind thousands of domains reflecting famous monikers, many of them misspellings of popular Web destinations or celebrity names.

In a previous trademark-infringement lawsuit, Zuccarini had told a federal court that he earned between $800,000 and $1 million a year from his Internet activities.

Under ICANN's quasi-judicial Uniform Domain-name Dispute Resolution Policy, Zuccarini has been in the center of such cases as Encyclopaedia Britannica's complaint over the misspelled domains Brtanica.com, Bitannica.com, and EncyclopediaBrittanica.com; actress Nicole Kidman's complaint over NicoleKidmanNude.com and the misspelled NicholeKidman.com; Microsoft Corp.'s complaint over EncartaEncyclopedia.com and Encata.com; and United Feature Syndicate's bid for and Dillbert.com.

In late 2000 alone, Zuccarini was order to pay at least $100,000 in each of two separate cybersquatting lawsuits under U.S. trademark law.

Reported by Newsbytes.com,http://www.newsbytes.com .
 
Domain summit 2024

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Originally posted by mole

Zuccarini may have done more than any other single individual to define Internet cybersquatting.

Could well be true, a very large number of UDRP decision's seem to use findings from previous Zucarrarani decisions, and he's certainly helped to give domain holders generally a bad name in the media more than anyone else; so he deserves all he gets.

I wonder if he'll move offshore now? :laugh:
 

Nic

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good, they should fine all pop up punks
 

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Originally posted by Nic
good, they should fine all pop up punks

cnn and microsoft included?

I think its more about t/m infringment and inappropriate content given the domains involved rather than pop-ups generally.
 

Guest
the probs come where every popup has an autospawn on close - so that you end up in a neverending cycle of ads.
 
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