Carphone Warehouse gets domain name revenge on Stelios

Admin · Sep 24, 2005

The Carphone Warehouse has won a spat over the domain names easiermobile.co.uk and ezeemobile.co.uk which it set up to parody Stelios Haji-Ioannou's easyGroup and its easyMobile.com service, despite losing a near-identical fight over easiermobile.com

http://www.out-law.com/page-6153

domaingenius · Sep 24, 2005

This is a good ruling for "us" as Blunt is obviously a QC/Barrister and has by the looks of it used the UK Laws rather than the Nominet rules to make his decision. This will make it harder for other "Easy Groups" or similar to take advantage of the Nominet rules being out of kilter with UK laws.
DG

EdPhillips · Sep 28, 2005

domaingenius said:
This is a good ruling for "us" as Blunt is obviously a QC/Barrister and has by the looks of it used the UK Laws rather than the Nominet rules to make his decision. This will make it harder for other "Easy Groups" or similar to take advantage of the Nominet rules being out of kilter with UK laws.
DG

Not at all. David Blunt was deciding this under the Nominet DRS, and as always UK law applies to the DRS. The decision is at:
http://www.nominet.org.uk/DisputeResolution/Decisions/Drs02599Easiermobile.html

Easy Group lost on the basis of rights (see para 41 if you don't want to read it all). If you look at Nominet's definition (in the DRS Policy http://www.nic.uk/DisputeResolution/DrsPolicy/) of "rights" it is "... rights enforceable under English law" so Nominet can't be out of step with the general law.