MOSCOW, December 12 - RAPSI. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia has held for Entrepreneur Media Inc. (EMI) in its lawsuit against Russian citizen Oleg Nevzorov, who registered domain names that are confusingly similar to its trademarks, according to the court judgment made available to the Russian Legal Information Agency (RAPSI/rapsinews.com).

Cybersquatting is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to another entity. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns the trademark contained within the name at an inflated price. Although the national legislation in many countries carries legal liability for such crimes, some legal owners of trademark names to prefer pay cybersquatters for such names as opposed to suing them.

According to the lawsuit, EMI has been publishing the Entrepreneur magazine since 1978. In 2010, EMI became aware of the registration of the domain names seattleentrepreneur.com and austinentrepreneur.com by Dale Tincher, a North Carolina resident. EMI then sent a letter by counsel to Tincher advising him of EMI's trademark rights and that his registration of the defendant domain names and other similar domain names was an infringement of EMI's trademark rights. EMI's counsel demanded that Tincher transfer the domain names at issue to EMI.

However, they did not receive a reply. Meanwhile, Tincher transferred the domains to Ukraine resident Vadim Piletsky.

The plaintiff consequently wrote a similar letter to Piletsky. However, the Ukrainian responded to EMI by refusing to transfer the domains to the legal owner. He then offered to sell the domains to EMI for a "reasonable" price. The plaintiff found that, prior to responding to EMI and offering to sell the domain names, Piletsky transferred the domain names to Russian Oleg Nevzorov.

EMI maintains that the domain names were registered in bad faith intent to profit from the registration or the use of the trademark.

The plaintiff wants the court to transfer the domains to EMI.

The court heard the case in the absence of the defendant and satisfied it in full.