Playboy.ai: “Little boy playing” defense fails

Panelist doesn’t accept domain registrant’s flimsy justification for registering playboy.ai.

I get a kick out of some of the defenses domain registrants throw up when confronted with a cybersquatting complaint.

Consider a case just published for playboy.ai. Playboy Enterprises International, Inc. filed a dispute against a person in China who registered the domain.

Playboy first offered to buy the domain from him, making an anonymous approach. The domain owner asked for $10 million Chinese Yuan (about $1.3 million).

When confronted with the cybersquatting claim, he said he registered the domain with the theme of “Little Boy Playing”, and planned to develop commercial projects in the direction of artificial intelligence and large models in the future to meet the needs of children.

He said that in China, the literal translation of “playing boy” (玩耍的男孩子) is playboy, so a domain name with an AI suffix was registered to reserve a domain name for children’s future dreams so they could invest and develop the project when the time came.

He also said the term “playboy” dates to 1829 and refers to “the good life of the rich.”

As for asking 10 million yuan to sell the domain, he said it was because he planned to use the domain personally (panelist’s translation from Chinese):

I put a high price on the Domain Name, because I had the original intention of the project in mind and felt that by asking a high price, it would be unlikely the other party would want to buy it.

Panelist David L. Kreider said there’s a conflict between the registrant’s argument that the translation is “playing boy” and the original use referring to “the good life of the rich”:

The Panel finds the Respondent’s suggestion that the Chinese words for ‘playing boy’ (玩耍的男孩子) would be understood in China as meaning ‘playboy’ is utter fiction, unsupported by any evidence. Rather, the Panel accepts that for Chinese in China, the word “playboy” is widely understood as referring only to either “a man who lives a life devoted chiefly to pleasure”, i.e., the dictionary definition of a “playboy”, or as “one of the world’s best-selling lifestyle magazines featuring the iconic Rabbit Head Logo”, i.e., Hugh Heffner’s creation now embodied in the Complainant’s Mark.

Furthermore, the domain registrant didn’t provide any evidence of his planned use of the domain for children.

Kreider didn’t buy the domain registrant’s story:

The Panel concludes from the text of the Respondent’s Chinese-language response and the surrounding facts and circumstances that the Respondent registered the Domain Name with full knowledge of the Complainant and its long-standing prior rights in the renowned PLAYBOY Mark.

He ordered the domain transferred.