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MAC Wins Suit Against Chinese ‘Cybersquatters’

Judgement will shut down counterfeit sites.

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By: TOM BRANNA

Editor

A US cosmetics company won a big victory over counterfeiters, but don’t expect MAC Cosmetics to collect its judgement any time soon. MAC and its parent company, the Estée Lauder Cos. Inc., won a $90 million judgment Tuesday against a ring of Chinese cybersquatters selling counterfeit MAC beauty products and cosmetics. The defendants did not respond to the suit and presiding Judge Ronnie Abrams issued a permanent injunction, which will shut down the infringing sites.

Filed in the Southern District of New York in April, the lawsuit named Tingting Chen, Limei Weng and Zhang Guithe and others who operated 112 websites including, themaccosmetics.com, mac2wholesale.com, maccosmeticworld.com, wholesalemacmakeup.com and cheapmakeuppick.com.

Because it is virtually impossible to collect funds from cybersquatters, the judge also ordered that any funds found in the PayPal accounts linked to the infringing sites be handed over to the plaintiffs, as well as control over any newly detected domain names associated with the original sites.

Additionally, the judge ordered that third parties providing services to the defendants, including online business-to-business selling platforms such as Alibaba.com, internet service providers, back-end-service providers, beb designers, search engines, shippers and domain name registrars be permanently enjoined from providing services to the defendants.


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