Vlogger Stacy Hinojosa has filed a lawsuit to get control over the StacyPlays.com domain name. She filed her claim with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where the headquarters of Verisign, .COM’s registry, is located. Hinojosa is one of the most popular Minecraft players, her YouTube channel having over 2 million subscribers. She also has over 700,000 followers on Twitter and over 450,000 followers on Instagram.
She is known as StacyPlays across all her social media accounts. Back in 2016, she registered StacyPlays as a trademark. In 2017, her lawyers filed a lawsuit under UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) to get the rights to StacyPlays.com. However, she lost the case. According to Domain Name Wire, the ruling was based on the fact that the domain name was registered (by Tulip Trading Company located in Saint Kitts and Nevis) in July 2015 and the trademark in December 2016.
However, the commercial court did not consider the fact that Stacy Hinojosa had been using the name StacyPlays since at least 2013 and was already an online celebrity when the domain name was registered. In addition, the parking webpage includes related ads mentioning Minecraft. This suggests that the registrant is knowingly playing with loaded dice and the court will have to investigate further.
