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Generic Domain Grabbing not Unethical, German Court Rules
Germany's Supreme Court recently overruled the lower courts on the issue of the right to register generic domain names. The case reaffirms the principle that domain names should be allocated on a "first come first served" basis. This approach is consistent with previous rulings of the German Supreme Court.
This case arose as a result of a dispute about the domains "www.welt-online.de" and "www.weltonline.de". Publishers of the German newsmagazine, "Die Welt", sued an individual who had registered 4,000 generic domain names, including the two in question. In an earlier case, a court ruled in favour of the magazine publisher with respect to www.welt-online.de. In this case the lower courts also ruled in favour of the publisher with respect to www.weltonline.de. The ruling in the second case has been overturned by the Supreme Court which found that merely reserving generic terms as domain names does not indicate an unethical intent to cause damage.
For a summary and a link to the decision, see: