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Italy’s Uffizi Gallery wins US court battle against ‘bloodsucking’ ticket touts

The world-famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence is celebrating after a US court barred online ticket touts from using the Italian museum's name.

Published: 7 February 2020 10:12 CET
Italy's Uffizi Gallery wins US court battle against 'bloodsucking' ticket touts
Florence's Uffizi Gallery (Galleria degli Uffizi) is one of Italy's most important, and most-visited, museums. Photo: AFP

The Arizona court ruled on Thusday against third parties using several addresses including Uffizi.com and Uffizi.net, the museum said, hailing the “historic” ruling.

Visitors to historic museums and sites around the world are frequently confronted with a plethora of websites masquerading as official sites when seeking to buy tickets online.

“These websites have been exploited to date for the sale of tickets to the museum at grossly inflated prices through improper use of the name Uffizi in a deliberate attempt to trick visitors,” the gallery said in a statement.

Visitors queue to get into the Uffizi Gallery (Galleria degli Uffizi) in Florence. Photo: AFP

“This was no mere small-time legal tussle: huge sums of money are involved in the phenomenon of online ticket touting, and it is money stolen from the community as a whole that ends up lining the pockets of the web's artful dodgers.”

The legal battle was with BoxNic Anstalt, a company that had registered numerous domains containing the word Uffizi in Arizona, said the museum, one of the most visited in the world.

The Arizona Federal Court has now declared the “museum's superior right” over that company to use the Uffizi name, brand and logo.

BoxNic had argued that the term “uffizi” was simply an old-fashioned spelling of the Italian word “uffici” or “offices”

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The court “has obliged the company to transfer the registration of the domains it had misappropriated to the Uffizi within 15 days,” the gallery said.

“We have delivered a devastating blow to the web's bloodsuckers who have been exploiting our heritage illegally and in bad faith for years like parasites, depriving the community of resources,” said gallery director Eike Schmidt.

“The Arizona court's ruling sets an extremely important international precedent,” the museum said.

The director of Florence's Uffizi Gallery museum, German Eike Schmidt. Photo: AFP

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CRIME

Italian police bust gang using luxury cars to smuggle Chinese migrants

The Chinese trafficking network used luxury cars to smuggle people into Italy before confiscating their passports and treating them like slaves, police said.

Published: 27 June 2024 10:28 CEST
Italian police bust gang using luxury cars to smuggle Chinese migrants

The smugglers had the migrants pose as “unsuspecting Asian citizens, well-dressed, with little luggage, travelling in powerful and expensive cars, driven by Chinese citizens who had lived in Italy for years and spoke Italian”, police said in a statement on Wednesday.

Investigators were alerted to a possible ring after a Chinese citizen was stopped at the border between Italy and Slovenia in April during routine checks, and found to be transporting four undocumented Chinese.

A probe uncovered “the existence of a consistent, continuous flow of irregular Chinese citizens who, in small groups, were flown to the external European borders in countries (mainly Serbia) where they entered with a visa exemption”, the statement said.

“And then, from there, they were accompanied by car, through Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia, up to the Italian state border”, it said.

Smuggled migrants were transported to a safehouse near Venice, where they stayed for one or two days before being taken on either to areas of Italy or other European Union countries like France and Spain.

The traffickers confiscated their passports at the safehouse and “from then on… (they) were exposed to severe exploitation until the debt incurred for the journey had been repaid”, the statement said.

The migrants were kept “without any possibility of a free or semi-free life, without medical assistance, with nothing except a bed and a place to work indefinitely,” police said, describing it as a sort of “slavery”.

Police arrested nine alleged members of the trafficking network during the operation and identified 77 undocumented migrants, “many of them women and some minors aged between 15 and 18”.

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