New Developments in German Domain Name Case Law

Germany has had, for several years now, a vital case law development in domain name matters. Almost a hundred decisions are published every year. Others remain unpublished and are known only to the parties. Although many of the published decisions are finally decided by the instance courts, some of them have reached the Federal Supreme Court which took the chance to provide guidance. In the past, the Federal Supreme Court allowed generic domain names under certain requirements in view of Unfair Competition Law (mitwohnzentrale.de = housing-cooperative.de) and ruled on domain name constellations where identical names were in question (shell.de).

In three new decisions, the highest German civil court clarified an important detail in German name law (maxem.de), denied certain claims against the German domain name authorities DENIC (kurt-biedenkopf.de) and did not object to the prohibition of the generic domain name with an indication of a city as in tauchschule-dortmund.de (= diving-s