Names.com crew at TwitchCon 2016.
Amazon, owners of the Twitch broadcasting network for gamers, filed a lawsuit against seven bot makers, last June.
The defendants have been selling software that artificially boosts user viewer numbers on Twitch; the lawsuit alleged that the Twitch bots degraded user experience, tarnishing its brand by making it “harder for Twitch users to discover legitimate broadcasters and for those broadcasters to succeed.”
According to the court’s decision, any domains containing the TWITCH trademark were ordered by the judge to be handed over, and the defendants should discontinue all provision of these Twitch bot services:
“Defendant will transfer the domain names twitchstarter.com and twitchstarter.tv to Twitch and will permanently disable the services previously offered at the websites associated with those domain names. Defendant will not attempt to re-register these domain names or register any other domain names that include the word ‘twitch’ or any confusingly similar word(s).”
Not all defendants responded during the first round, and some reside outside of the US.
Twitch.TV and its associated business was acquired in 2014 for $970 million dollars, paid in cash.
Two years ago, Twitch acquired Twitch.com from its owner for almost seven figures, and the network has rolled out its own gamers’ conference, TwitchCon.
In September 2014, we exclusively interviewed Peter Kay, seller of Twitch.com to Amazon’s Twitch.
