Thursday, January 12, 2006

False advertising over domain names

C.E. Petit pointed out this IPKat piece on Nominet's Australian victory against companies that mined data from Nominet's database of .uk registrants and then sent them what looked like official invoices, offering .com domain names. The decision, which I have not yet read, apparently rests both on the copyright in the database and on unfair trade practices. As might be expected, I think the former is silly (though it might well be within the law, if defendants extracted a substantial portion of the database contents) but the latter is sensible. As I understand it, this sort of invoice fraud happens with all sorts of basic business supplies.

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