Virgin Group gets into a feud with Trademark Infringers

September 22,2018:

Virgin Group, a British multinational venture capital conglomerate, sued a fictitious entity ‘Virgin Capital Partners’ for infringing on its ‘Virgin’ trademark in a lawsuit filed at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 19.Virgin alleged that US-individual ‘Frenchie Benjamin’ and internet service provider Namecheap, infringed on Virgin’s trademark.

Virgin Group has registered the mark ‘virgin’ in a range of goods and services including for air travel and mobiles and claims to have registered 4500 domain names under the same.

According to the suit, Namecheap is a domain name registrar owing 115 trademark registrations and applications, under which Benjamin bought the domain names virgincapitalpartners.com and virgincapitalpartners.net.

The plaintiff said that in November 2016, Benjamin launched virgincapitalpartners.net which displays the mark ‘Virgin’ being used in relation to financial services. The plaintiff tried to resolve the dispute outside of the court; however, Benjamin refused to comply. After sending an official letter to Benjamin in July 2017, the .net website was disabled and the two domain names registrations expired a month later.

After the plaintiff acquired .net domain and Benjamin acquired the .com domain, the plaintiff sent another letter to Benjamin for its blatant and willful infringement in December 2017. The plaintiff said that Benjamin declined to rebrand or disable the website unless compensated for it.

The suit added that Benjamin refused any kind of settlement and after a cease-and-desist letter was sent to Namecheap they clearly denied hosting the infringed website.

Virgin Group seeks the ownership of virgincapitalpartners.com, along with damages and a permanent injunction against both the defendants.

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