Archive

October 13, 2010

Browsing

At the end of September, the Court of Appeal in Brussels passed a verdict regarding a Chinese student. She had hijacked more than 10.200 .eu domain names. The Court judged that the student had registered those names in bad faith. ‘The only motivation to register those names was to make a hugh profit by selling those names,’ stated the Court.

The Chinses student had hijacked more than 10.200 .eu names from several European companies. She had set up an ingenious system which registered the names when they became available for registration right after the sunrise period.

When the .eu extension was launched, this release started with a sunrise. This sunrise commenced on December 7th 2005 and ended on April 6th 2006. During this sunrise, companies were given the possibility to register their registered trademark or company name under the .eu extension. To do so, they needed to prove the requested name resembled their registered trademark or company name.  If the companies couldn’t submit the requested documents, their application was rejected.

After the sunrise period followed the landrush. During this landrush, everyone who wished to do so, could register a .eu domain name. And that’s exactly where the Chinese domain pirate took advantage of. Through her system she registered on a large scale domain names of which the application was initially rejected during the sunrise. And her system worked! She was able to register more than 8.000 .eu-names on the first day of the landrush. All those names had initially been rejected during the sunrise.

The Chinese student hijacked the names of for instance KatoenNatie, Charleroi Airport and Arcelor. But also car company Bentley, designer Olivier Strelli, cook Jamie Oliver, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, tour operator Thomas Cook and organisations such as Rotary appeared on the list of this domain pirate.

The companies which became the victim of this student had two choices: they could start a juridical procedure against her in order to get their domain name back. Or they could buy their domain name of her for much more money than the original registration price. At least 1.400 companies paid the student to get their domain name back.

However some of the victims contacted EURid (.eu-registry) asking if the registry couldn’t do something against these practices. EURid decided to block the involved names so the student couldn’t sell them anymore. Of course, the student wasn’t amused with this blockage. She started a procedure against EURid at the Court of Appeal in Brussels so EURid would be forced to end the blockage. However, at the end of September, the Court agreed with EURid.

According to Tom Heremans, the lawyer of EURid, it can still take a while before these .eu domain names will be released again. ‘We first want to make sure the student isn’t going to go into higher appeal,’ says Heremans.