We have recently received a number of remarkable court decisions, concerning rights in appellations. By a ruling on appeal against a rejecting first instance decision, the High Court in Prague ordered a preliminary injunction, imposing upon defendant an obligation to refrain from dispositions with a domain name which was (apart from others) a subject matter of the litigation.

This ruling signifies a departure from the existing practice which would refuse requests for preliminary injunctions imposing obligations of similar character due to an alleged lack of necessity to preliminarily regulate relationships of the parties in this regard (although the courts might have later on satisfied the meritory request to transfer the domain name to plaintiff or to refrain from its use). As a result, defendant usually transferred the domain in course of the litigation to a third party or abandoned the registration in favour of a third person, and so plaintiff would no more be able to successfully enforce the favourable meritory judgment, being left with no other option than to repeat the entire litigation against the new holder of registration. In the reported case it was exactly the fear that the enforcement of the prospective meritory decision might be threatened that was behind the High Court’s ruling.

In another case, the High Court in Olomouc was dealing with the issue of relationship between trademark law and unfair competition law. In the case at issue, plaintiff sought relief against infringement of his rights in a registered trademark. Defendant based his defence on the agreement that his alleged legal predecessors were using the contentions appellation before plaintiff. In view of this, the first instance court rejected the trademark infringement action, referring, without any proper specification, to established practices of competition. The High Court cancelled the first instance decision on the strength of the fact that claims deriving from trademark infringement must be assessed in accordance with the law on trademarks, which specifies the conditions under which the trade-mark owner’s rights may be restricted to the benefit of a holder of nonregistered sign. It is therefore inadmissible, so the court stated, to ignore the specific legal regulation in trademark law and to consider the matter only in the light of purported established practices in competition. 

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