One of my sites www.lrgclothing.org was shutdown due to copyright/trademark violations with the use of the name. The owner of Lrg clothing actually called my cellular phone and asked me about the site...kind of a weird moment. Needless to say it was a very newbie mistake to not get private registration for that type of site. The good thing is that all my sites are based around fashion so I just forward them to my main site (dobizo) because its about entering the fashion industry. So if one site goes down I just forward the domain to a specific article on Dobizo and give it a little traffic boost. Is that what most do? Get private registration for site names?
Private registration can help -- but what it sounds like what they did was send a DMCA request to your host, which doesn't require any whois information on your domain. If they wanted to shut it down further they would have to go into arbitration with WIPO, which wouldn't require whois information, simply a nice chunk of capital, and the domain would then be transfered to them... But yes, I personally always recommend private site registration if you don't want strange emails/phonecalls -- just make sure that the registrar can't say the domain belongs to them with your "Domain Privacy" purchase thing (RegisterFly problem?). In the interim I guess you could forward the traffic as you say you already are, but long term if you don't own your own server in a data center that has some gumption, they will probably continue to send DMCA requests to your hosts if the site is hosting itself.
You can't hide behind private registration when a copyright/trademark infringement is claimed. Your registrar will cave and unhide your name/address/email.
DMCA would have nothing to do with a trademark dispute, only if there were copyright issues which would involve images or text, not the company name. Having private whois may have prevented direct contact, but it does not prevent them from doing something about it. By the way, forwarding the infringing domain to another of your fashion domains does not stop you from being guilty of trademark infringement. Using a trademarked name to drive traffic to one of your pages is still trademark infringement. If that company has anybody that knows anything about trademark law and the internet, you have not solved your problem (unless they choose not to pesue it further).
One of these days you are going to come across an aggressive company that sues everyone who infringes upon their trademark (like Mattel). You'll not only have to pay your legal fees, but theirs (and potentially treble their fees), all revenue your site has ever generated, plus some hefty damages. They don't have to warn you - and you don't get a chance to take down the site and make your legal problems go away. I wouldn't keep a redirect on the domain. The little traffic it may provide isn't worth the risk. As bluegrass said, it's still trademark infringement.
They chose not to...I think there main problem was that my site was pulling traffic from their online site.