A ruling has been passed on the most unusual domain dispute in Russia. According to the court case, reports the Internet and Law website, the partner of a major registrar has moved the Print.ru domain name under its management through an obscure procedure that allegedly gave it a 50/50 co-ownership right. When the domain was sold, the company went to court claiming it was entitled to a share.
According to the case file, the company L-TRADE asked the court to satisfy the following demands:
- to declare the transaction transferring Print.ru to a new registrant invalid;
- to require each of the parties to return to the other party everything received under the transactions transferring the rights to Print.ru;
- to require the defendant to transfer the rights to administer Print.ru to the plaintiff.
According to the plaintiff, the defendant had accepted the terms and conditions of a public offer on fractional ownership, renewal of registration and guarantee of sale of the Customer's domain names. Under the agreement, the plaintiff had undertaken to pay for the renewal of the domain name (Print.ru) indefinitely, while the defendant had agreed to transfer 50 percent ownership of the given domain name. The agreement was concluded after the plaintiff placed a public offer on the podumai.ru website and the defendant accepted that public offer.
In court, the defendant's representative objected to the claim, because:
- no agreements, in particular, agreements regarding the Print.ru domain name, have ever been concluded between the plaintiff and the defendant;
- the defendant is not familiar with the plaintiff, and has not entered into any other relationship with them;
- the agreement was not concluded because the defendant never performed an act of accepting the public offer.
The current registrant’s representative did not consider the plaintiff’s claims valid either, because:
- there is no evidence that the defendant had accepted the terms of the offer on the co-ownership of the domain;
- there are reasonable doubts about the said public offer being in place as of the date of its conclusion;
- the public offer referred to by the plaintiff runs contrary to the current legislation;
- the domain name Print.ru cannot be recalled from the current registrant.
Lawyer Anton Sergo (Internet and Law), who represented the domain registrant in court, explained that the plaintiff’s claim is based on a partnership agreement with RU-CENTER (Regional Network Information Center JSC), one of Russia’s largest domain name registrars and hosting providers. However, that partnership agreement envisages a closed-end list of services, while the possibility of “joint domain ownership” between the partner and the registrant is not on that list. Consequently, the public offer on joint ownership of the domain was outside the plaintiff’s activities as a partner of RU-CENTER.
In accordance with the Terms and Conditions of Domain Name Registration in .RU and .РФ, a domain name can have only one registrant, and their information is entered into the registry. So it is not even possible to register the fractional ownership of a domain name either initially or as a result of a “transfer of interest” procedure.
Moreover, the proceedings revealed that the statute of limitations for the case had expired. As a result, the claim was denied. Issues concerning the reimbursement of legal costs of the persons involved in this case are being considered now.
