Has anyone ever gone looking for hot spicy pictures of Richard Branson? On second thoughts, don’t answer that. An Australian has lost the rights to the richardbranson.xxx domain to Richard Branson himself, although Branson is unlikely to even touch the domain.
The BBC reports on the case, which saw the US-based National Arbitration Forum rule in favour of Branson over Australian Sean Truman, who registered richardbranson.xxx in 2011 for, so he stated ‘souvenir’ purposes. The Virgin business empire was in the process of ensuring that richardbranson.xxx would be blocked from existence — it’s possible for trademark owners to block .xxx domains from availability — when Truman registered it.
I was going to say that the application clearly rubbed Branson up the wrong way, but then I’d start a cavalcade of smutty puns — and who needs that? [BBC]
Picture by Larry Busacca/Getty Images