Domain name registry, Melbourne IT, the company behind Internet Names Australia, has won a case against a Queensland company that was using the top level domain Melbourne-IT.com, forcing them to hand over the domain name and pay costs.
Melbourne IT took the company to court after finding that it had established a competing business, selling domain names, from the top level URL. The Melbourne IT case was mounted against Simon Strauss, Marilyn Strauss, Atnet Pty Ltd and Neil Pentland, all from Southport in Queensland.
Under the Federal Court order, the defendants will be restrained from taking part in business under any name associated with or similar to Melbourne IT. The defendants were ordered to pay costs and hand the domain name over to Melbourne IT.
The court's decision was a win for all legitimate Australian e-businesses according to Melbourne IT's CEO, Professor Peter Gerrand.
"This legal precedent is great news for all legitimate Australian businesses embarking on eCommerce. The granting of these injunctions confirms that domain name pirates will not be tolerated by the Australian legal system."
Melbourne IT was in a similar situation earlier in the year, after a South Australian company Futurechicks, set up a protest site at www.internetnamesaustralia.com in response to Melbourne IT deregistering its domain name www.fuck.com.au. While the earlier case was resolved out of court, Gerrand says that he wanted to have a precedent to base future cases on.
"This time we really wanted to see if we could get a legal precedent to protect all Australian businesses who are working in the e-commerce industry. "
Gerrand said that the worldwide development of e-commerce relies on the development of solid agreements between governments over intellectual property issues and that more needs to be done to set out the framework.
"I think that it's very important that world governments in the developed countries sign up a treaty to extend international law to other countries. I think that e-commerce is going to motivate more common ground to provide a stable groundwork for international commerce."
