American company must repay $120,000 to Uffizi. Schmidt: Great victory against network vampires.

Four months ago, in February, the Uffizi Galleries had won an important victory against online scalping. The Federal Court of Arizona had ruled in a ruling that only the Florentine museum headquarters could use websites containing the name “Uffizi” because it was the sole legitimate owner of the name.

The BoxNic company was using, with U.S.-registered domains, sites with names such as uffizi.com, uffizi.net, uffizigallery.com, and uffizigallery.org to sell tickets to the Galleries at a premium price: the Arizona court had this abusive practice stopped, as it was unduly using the museum’s name. This was MiBACT’s first-ever international court battle against online scalping.

Now there have been further developments: magistrates in the same federal court have ordered the company to pay the Uffizi $120,000 (about 106,000 euros) as reimbursement for the legal costs of the trial it incurred in America.

“In the American legal system it is rare for the judge to condemn the payment of the legal costs of the proceedings, but, according to the federal magistrates in Arizona, this time this measure is fully justified by the seriousness of the behavior of our counterpart,” stressed the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt. “It is a definitive confirmation of the Uffizi’s first major victory in the difficult fight against network vampires. A fight that certainly does not stop here, but continues even harder to eradicate this scourge.”

American company must repay $120,000 to Uffizi. Schmidt: Great victory against network vampires.

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