Pottery Barn Sues Lars

SAN FRANCISCO ? In a move that could have wide-ranging effects for the online adult industry, Williams-Sonoma has filed suit in U.S. District Court, charging a slew of online adult entertainment companies with infringing on the company?s popular Pottery Barn trademark to drive traffic to various ?pornographic? websites.
The federal lawsuit names FriendFinder, Online Marketing Services, Unimaster, Yeticash, Domain Name Systems, Virtual World Holdings AVV, Moniker Privacy Services, Ales Lexico, John Salmond, Ford Jeske, Andrej Korchev, Vladimir Techl and Dorothy Simpson. Believing that there are other infringers out there, attorneys for Williams-Sonoma also reserved the right to add additional defendants.

?The purpose of this lawsuit is to seek damages and injunctive relief to stop defendants from their practice of using and infringing Williams-Sonoma famous Pottery Barn family of trademarks to identify their explicit and graphic pornographic adult websites,? Williams-Sonoma attorney Gregory Gilchrist said.

The suit alleges that the defendants misuse the Pottery Barn trademarks in a variety of ways, including embedding the term ?potterybarnteens? in source code, using ?potterybarnteens? as a domain extension and repeatedly using the term ?potterybarnteens? in copy throughout various websites.