ADR Center for .eu Domains Resolves First Dispute

The ADR Center for .eu Disputes, attached to the Czech Arbitration Court, has resolved its first domain dispute. The Czech Arbitration Court has the contract to decide all .eu domain registration disputes, including challenges to applications that have been validated during the sunrise period. In the pst.eu dispute (Case No. 00035), a Netherlands corporation, Peripheral Systems Technology BV (Peripheral), challenged the awarding of the pst.eu domain to PST Business Solutions BV (Business Solutions). Both corporations had applied for the pst.eu domain on the same day, the first day of the first sunrise period. The first sunrise period enabled owners of registered trade-marks based in the EU to pre-register their .eu domain. The Registry, EURid, is required to register the domain name on a first-come, first-serve basis. Peripheral owns a registered trade-mark in Benelux for PST and design (PST within a green oval). It had opposed Business Solutions' application for the word mark PST on the basis of its earlier registration. Because that opposition was still subject to appeal, Peripheral argued that Business Solutions should not be granted the pst.eu domain name. The Panel concluded that while Peripheral had filed an opposition against Business Solutions' mark, the opposition had been finalized without any statement that the trade-mark had been rejected. The Panel accepted documentation provided by EURid on behalf of Business Solutions to show that it was the owner of the PST trade-mark registered in Benelux (EURid is the respondent in all .eu domain disputes). Therefore, because both parties had valid trade-mark registrations, the panel confirmed the decision of the Registry to assign the pst.eu domain name to Business Solutions, which had applied for the domain name on December 7, 2005 at 11:01:21.274 h, as opposed to Peripheral which had applied for the domain name on December 7, 2005 at 1:07:59.072 h. For the decision of the ADR Center for .eu Disputes, see: http://www.adreu.eurid.eu/adr/decisions/decision.php?dispute_id=35 Summary by: Katharine McGinnis and Hung Nguyen