Iron Maiden has had it with people counterfeiting their merchandise on-line.
They filed a lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against a number of sites that have been selling what they consider to be low quality versions of their official merchandise which they sell through their on-line store.
According to the suit “Consumers have come to expect the highest quality from plaintiff’s products provided under the ‘Iron Maiden’ trademarks” adding that the “Plaintiff is forced to file this action to combat defendants’ counterfeiting of plaintiff’s registered trademarks, as well as to protect unknowing consumers from purchasing unauthorised Iron Maiden products over the internet”
The allege that the offending sites are branding themselves to appear to be authorized resellers of the band’s merchandise, “trading on the band’s reputation and goodwill”.
“There are similarities among the Defendant Internet Stores. For example, some of the Defendant websites have virtually identical layouts, even though different aliases were used to register the respective domain names. In addition, the counterfeit Iron Maiden products for sale in the Defendant Internet Stores bear similarities and indicia of being related to one another, suggesting that the counterfeit Iron Maiden products were manufactured by and come from a common source and that, upon information and belief, Defendants are interrelated. The Defendant Internet Stores also include other notable common features, including use of the same domain name registration patterns, unique shopping cart platforms, accepted payment methods, check-out methods, meta data, illegitimate SEO tactics, HTML user-defined variables, domain redirection, lack of contact information, identically or similarly priced items and volume sales discounts, similar hosting services, similar name servers, and the use of the same text and images.”
The band is looking for $2 million for each infringing use and that the court order the online sites that host the infringing retailers disable and stop providing services to the counterfeiters.