Nominet sues Australian domain name scammers and wins
22 September 2004
Nominet, the .uk Internet domain name registry, today celebrates success in its Australian court battle against several parties accused of copyright infringement and breaches of Australian fair trade laws by issuing misleading notices.
The case was brought by Nominet following Nominet's discovery in January 2003 that its WHOIS database had been the subject of concerted data mining attacks.
The sheer scale of these assaults subsequently forced Nominet to suspend its WHOIS system for the only time in its six year history. The attacks captured details of many .uk domain name holders and resulted in 50,000 registrants receiving misleading notices from "UK Internet Registry" regarding their domain name registrations.
Justice French said that the notices sent by UK Internet Registry were "nothing less than deceitful".
The judgment of Justice French in the Federal Court is a powerful precedent for Nominet and domain name registries worldwide. The Court has confirmed and enforced Nominet's copyright in the .uk Register and WHOIS database. The existence of these rights allows Nominet to prevent information on its databases being inappropriately used by third parties and reinforces Nominet's authority to impose terms and conditions on the use of the data it holds.
We are delighted by this result, particularly as it upholds our ability to protect information relating to .uk registrantssaid Nominet Managing Director, Lesley Cowley.
Naturally, we want to control use of the intellectual property that we hold and to have succeeded in protecting our copyright ownership is a significant outcome for us, the industry globally and for registrants who do not want to receive scam notices. By fighting, and winning, this case we are saying very clearly that scamming is a serious industry issue which will not be tolerated and anyone caught doing it will be pursued and brought to justice.
Apply for your free web assessment - get a complete health check and optimisation action plan from Weboptimiser, the experts.
Related news
|
|
Leading brand search engine marketing since 1996
Founded in 1996 as an SEO company, Weboptimiser is today one of the Internet marketing sector's best-known and most respected search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) search engine marketing companies.
With a unique portfolio of brand-friendly services, including usability, contextual advertising and web analytics, a pioneering methodology that covers all 4 stages of interaction between a web site and its visitors, we make our clients sites faster, smarter, busier and more profitable.
