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Mattel gets litigious on chinabarbie.com

Trademark lawsuit seeks unspecified damages

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Mattel yesterday filed suit in Manhattan federal court against www.chinabarbie.com for "using the toymaker's famed 'Barbie' trademark as part of the name for a pornographic website", Reuters reports.

The suit, which is seeking unspecified damages, says the site is operated by Florida-based Global China Networks using a New York postal address and had "sold memberships to the site to customers around the world".

The suit also helpfully adds that "American girls aged between 3 and 11 own an average of eight Barbie dolls each". ®

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Latest Comments

American justice

You've just got to love it when an American corporation can appropriate a common name (Barbie) and then prevent anyone else from ever using that name again. It's not like they created a new name for their doll, they used a name that was already in use. That would be like a corporation today making a "Jennifer" doll and then suing anyone who tried to use that name. It's ridiculous.

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Anonymous Coward

Site broken :(

Bah, the alleged pr0n site seems to be malfunctioning. It has a completely innocent front page with an "Enter" link, which points to a page the server doesn't find.

Does anybody have a working link to the site's real contents? Or is it really completely offline now?

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Anonymous Coward

Mattel have been doing this for years

One of our hosting customers asked me to change her domain name from one that referenced the word Barbie to a slightly different variation.

I asked her why and apparently they took her to some kind of tribunal and managed to get the domain transferred into their own names.

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