bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Mark O'Neill

Swedish furniture giant Ikea has won a landmark lawsuit against a Beijing 'net-mailer'.

It registered Ikea's trademark and thousands of others as Internet domain names and planned to sell them back to their owners.

The Beijing Number Two Intermediate Court on Tuesday ruled Beijing Guowang Information had illegally registered the Ikea brand as a domain name and copyright protection accorded to the Swedish firm when it registered its name in the mainland in 1983 extended to the virtual world, the Legal Daily reported.

Other companies whose domain names Guowang had registered include Cartier, Dunhill, Carlsberg, Rolex and Du Pont.

It was the first mainland court case  over an Internet domain name involving a foreign company and the first time a dispute involving a domain name had been settled in a court.

Du Pont is also suing Guowang for registering its name on the Internet.

'We discovered this last year,' a Du Pont official in Beijing said.

'The company's purpose was to get us to buy the name back. The court decision is good news for us.' During the court proceedings, Guowang said it had registered thousands of famous brands as Internet names. Officials of the company could not be reached for comment but analysts described it as a 'net-mailer' which registered the names not for its own use but as a way to get the legitimate owners to pay to get their name back.

Ikea in 1983 registered its trademark, in English and Chinese and discovered the 'netnap' only when it was preparing its Web site. It found Guowang had registered the ikea.com.cn name on November 19, 1997.

Guowang argued that the domain name and trademark were different and that registering the domain name did not constitute infringement of copyright.

But presiding Judge Wang Fanwu rejected the argument, saying the mainland was following other countries in extending protection of trademark to the Internet.

'The Internet is virtual reality but is not dreamland. It has changed traditional forms of behaviour, but, once there is human activity there, this cannot escape the laws and regulations of human society. Those who say that laws do not govern Internet disputes are wrong,' he said.

He had decided the case on the basis of the nation's copyright regulations and international agreements, which showed the mainland was according a high level of protection to famous brands. 'My ruling follows a similar one in a European court six months ago, which was the first of its kind in the European Union,' he said.

An Ikea official said the company had had no tangible loss from the registration because Guowang had no retail operations. 'We had an intangible loss because we were unable to register our proper name on the Web as Guowang had done it first,' the official said.



Beijing court foils name-napper's hopes of Ikea ransom