Supreme Court Ruling on DENIC Take Down Duty Could Have Wide Application

BERLIN — A German Supreme Court ruling earlier in 2011 on the obligations of a domain registry operator to delete domain registrations that are clearly unlawful could have application beyond the narrow factual situation presented by that case.

The case involved DENIC, the registry for the .de country-code top-level domain (ccTLD). The domain names in dispute contained the German word for “government”, which, according to the court, were so clearly unlawful that they triggered a duty on the part of DENIC to delete them without any further process.

“Germany’s domain registry DENIC is responsible for assessing .de naming rights and ...