Issues to Consider When Acquiring a Domain Name

Trevor Cox *

This article is associated with the conference hosted by the Vienna International Arbitral Centre of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber (VIAC) and the Moot Alumni Association, ‘Electronic Commerce and its Growing Importance in Law and Business’ which was held in Vienna, Austria on 22 March 2002.

Mr Trevor Cox provides us with a practical overview of the law relating to domain names in ‘Issues to Consider When Acquiring a Domain Name’.  In this article, Cox considers the intricacies that companies need to understand when acquiring a domain name, including the relationship between trademarks and domain names and the due diligence processes to be undertaken when seeking to obtain a domain name. 

*    Trevor Cox is an international intellectual property and technology licensing attorney who worked in the Intellectual Property and Technology Group at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich LLP in San Francisco, California from September 1999 until January 2002. Trevor can be reached at tcox@maa.net or trevor_cox@yahoo.com.  The author would like to acknowledge and thank Eliane Setton at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich LLP for her assistance in preparing this article.