Russian company Legato has filed suit with the Commercial Court of the Samara Region after being blocked at ICANN.
There is a long history behind the lawsuit filed against US-based Public Interest Registry (PIR), a nonprofit corporation that operates the .org top-level domain, over the Cyrillic .орг domain.
Legato registered the .орг and .ком trademarks in Russia in 2007. ICANN did not approve the .орг and .ком domains because at the time there were no internationalized domain names (IDNs), which contain letters or characters from non-Latin scripts, and they could not be used outside Russia. However, they could be used in Russia as an alternate address space with a specific addressing system and with additional plug-in software.
The situation changed drastically with the launch of ICANN’s New gTLDs and global support for IDNs. Public Interest Registry and VeriSign submitted bids for the Cyrillic .орг and .ком domains, respectively, which ICANN granted.
This has created a dangerous precedent in which each of the two domains is de facto owned by two administrators. Legato tried to resolve the issue, but ICANN dismissed its appeal. On May 27, Public Interest Registry announced the availability of open registration on the .орг domain. Legato has filed a lawsuit against PIR and also plans to sue VeriSign if it takes action to use the .ком domain.
Experts say there is actually little at stake in the dispute. According to Webnames, which registers .орг and .ком domain users under a contract with Legato, there are only a few hundred users. Experts don’t think these domains have a future and say that .рф, a rapidly growing market leader, is a much better zone for Cyrillic domains.
But there are still legal grounds to sue. “The protection of trademark owners’ interests is a basic value of the international community, which has been cooperating with ICANN in launching new root domains,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ (CC for TLD RU/РФ). “In this particular case, the Russian rights holder has the same rights as recognized leaders of the domain industry. Given the specific features of law enforcement in Russia, the best solution would be an out-of-court settlement.”
