The assistance of Havel, Holásek & Partners s.r.o. in averting further abuse of the Justice Ministry’s name inspires the blocking of other domains abusing the names of public entities |
|
The Czech Central Register of Debtors is a private project of the Czech entrepreneur, Jiří Jehlička, and is controlled through his firm registered in the USA. The Czech Central Register of Debtors is not an official loan register. According to publicly accessible information, the major financial institutions do not cooperate with this register and do not recognise its paid “certificate of no debt”. There is a well-grounded suspicion that domains that contain names of ministries or other public entities have been used without authorisation since 2006. This practice possesses both general and specific elements of anti-competition behaviour, as the abused domain names may make the impression that the concerned entities approve or support the information published on these websites, including the project of the Czech Central Register of Debtors. However, the respective entities disavowed the Czech Central Register of Debtors and the concerned domains: On 8 March 2006, the Czech Ministry of Finance published a warning for the general public by which it strongly objected to any connections between the ministry and the “ministerstvofinanci.cz” domain. However, according to our information, no major success was achieved in the field of the legal protection of these entities before the issuance of the preliminary ruling concerning the “ministerstvo-spravedlnosti.cz” domain. Thus, the adoption of the widely publicised preliminary ruling (see e.g. in this link), based on which the “ministerstvo-spravedlnosti.cz” domain was blocked, is a very important decision which might be a positive signal, as well as a precedent for any future disputes on domain names that are used without authorisation for the promotion of the Czech Central Register of Debtors. Havel, Holásek & Partners s.r.o., attorneys-at-law believe that the abuse of the “ministerstvo-spravedlnosti.cz” domain will also be confirmed in the related proceedings before the Arbitration Tribunal attached to the Czech Economic Chamber and the Czech Agrarian Chamber, which aim to achieve the transfer of the rights attached to the concerned domain to the Czech Ministry of Justice. |
The attorneys of Havel, Holásek & Partners s.r.o. represented the Czech Ministry of Justice in a case that involved the issuance of a preliminary ruling concerning the blocking of the “ministerstvo-spravedlnosti.cz” domain, which primarily promotes the Czech Central Register of Debtors. This register attempts to make the impression of an official and respectable website by incorporating the names of public bodies in the domain names it uses.
