Legal row over who owns France.com domain | Hacker News Reader

Legal row over who owns France.com domain

bbc.co.uk

33 pointsdustinmoris18 comments

... it's more simple than that. He had registered several trademarks under the name France.com. The French gvt sued him to transfer these trademarks.

And they won thanks to trademark law that prevents registering trademarks when people have prior rights on them - which the French gvt has on the name France.

The judges also explained that he never tried to demonstrate that the French gvt was aware of this use and that let us do it.

And finally, they explained that he was exactly the same thing as if someone had registered a website using the name and the identity of someone else.

They end up explaining that there is a risk of confusion between his website, and the official website of the French gvt.

Thus, web.com decided to transfer the website as the French gvt was the new legal owner of these trademarks.

There is no bad faith in it. He used these trademarks for a while, but when their legit owner decided to stop him, it did and that's it.

The two legal decisions provided on his website are quite clear.

As far as I'm aware, French court does not have any jurisdiction over web.com - therefore the transfer was unfounded.

As a matter of fact, they do. They can apply Trademark Law, and thus their decision apply in the US - thanks to Trademark treatises.

Thus, once they had decided on an the registrar had really no option but to oblige and transfer the website.

The registrar could have contested the decision and asked for its exequatur in the US, but it would have been a waste of time, and he could have been subject to penalties in France, but also in the US.

That's not how American law works. An American registrar is under no obligation to comply before American judicial review. Nothing in American law would have subjected them to penalties if they'd told France to go get an American court order, which they would happily comply with. France can of course impose whatever penalties it wants (and collect them to the best of its abilities). I'm pretty sure it works the same in the other direction, too.

Do judgments work like that within the EU? I'm wondering if the unusually close relationship among EU countries gives EU citizens a misleading picture of international law in general.

> Before a US court will enforce a judgment issued by a foreign court, the US court must first recognize the judgment. To “recognize” a foreign judgment means to make it equal to any other judgment issued by a US court. A foreign judgment recognized by a US court—a domesticated judgment—has the same authority as a judgment first issued in the United States. Foreign judgments cannot be enforced in the US before they are recognized.

https://harrisbricken.com/blog/recognition-foreign-judgments...

> The French gvt sued him to transfer these trademarks.

They are only trademarks within France. Country names cannot be trademarked internationally as Iceland has found versus the Icelamd chain of supermarkets.

I still don't understand why web.com obeyed a French court order, since its parent seems to have no significant operations in the EU. Could Maduro shut down DolarToday.com with a Venezuelan court order?

Discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16952186

when it comes to a namespace such as .com or the DNS root, the only owner is the party that controls this namespace.

Never use web.com/Network Solutions.

Sounds more like France has been acting in bad faith. You can't just decree a seizure of a domain because you're a political entity that wants it.

> You can't just decree a seizure of a domain because you're a political entity that wants it.

This is literally a case of that happening. So, you can decree a seizure of a domain because you're a political entity that wants it.

Sure, and I suppose you could decree yourself ruler of the world, too. Reality, however, is another matter entirely.

France will not win a legal battle over this outside of France.

But the weird thing is that France didn't have to--the American registrar obeyed their order, for no clear reason. The domain has now been transferred to a French registrar. So even if an American court would never have ordered the domain transferred, it will be trickier (but probably not impossible, since Verisign ultimately controls .com and that's a US entity) for an America court order to get it back.

> So even if an American court would never have ordered the domain transferred

American courts are typically quite sensitive to arguments made based on trademark law.

There’s simply nothing tricky about American courts taking over .com domains, at least not for the courts.

I'm betting he incurs more legal fees than if the domain were still at a US registrar; but yeah, I agree that if a US court orders the .com back to him, then they can make it happen.

The whole story is weird. When web.com first locked the domain, why didn't he seek an American court order to force web.com to transfer the domain to a friendly registrar?

Apparently you can. Note to self: Do not antagonize government by appropriating stuff that you can reasonably expect might belong to them and if you do hand it over at the first opportunity to do so with your hide in one piece.

IME Web.com and NetSol will give you domain to anyone who calls them. Not just France.

Tesla got hacked this way, for example, I listened to the call recording.

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