Domain Names Disputes Under Iranian Law
Domain Names Disputes Under Iranian Law maintains that disputes over a trademark-based domain name must be resolved by agreement, court action, or arbitration before cancellation, suspension, or transfer of the domain name.
As companies working in Iran use internet for introducing their products and presenting the related information about corporations, domain name disputes have been expanded in recent years. In this article, the disputes over domain names under Iranian law will be reviewed and discussed. Before going into the legal claims regarding domain names in Iran, it is necessary to get acquainted with domain names a bit and look into the related technical concepts.
Domain Names
Domain names are identification strings that internet users apply in networking contexts for addressing purposes. In general, users can have access to the content of their sites through browsers by specific names that identifies their network domain. For example, the web address for Microsoft is www.microsoft.com, but at the same time Bill Gates can also have an email address like bill[at]microsoft.com. Here, in both cases a single domain name is used, i.e. microsoft.com but it should be noted that the second one is an email address. Without a domain name, a computer cannot recognize where to search for a web page and email routes cannot send emails, too.
The Hierarchy of Domain Names
There is a hierarchy of labels for domain names in Internet Domain Name System (DNS). The highest level domain name is shown as a suffix after a dot at the end of the domain name. For the aforementioned domain name, i.e. www.microsoft.com, the suffix .com is the first-level domain name, microsoft is the second-level domain, and www. is the third-level domain name which is also called a sub-domain.
The Suffix .com Domain Name
The suffix .com is a top level domain name that defines a generic domain name, i.e. the name does not specify the name of a company, organization, or a personal name, but defines a general category. The suffix .com stands for commercial and the domains with this name are used mostly by commercial websites and corporations. There are other top level domains like .org, .gov, .edu, and .net. The domain name with the suffix .org (organization) is used for non-benefit websites, .gov (government) is used for governmental organizations, .edu (education) is used for domain names belonging to educational institutions, and .net derived from network is used for organizations active in networking technologies and the related fields.
Country code Top Level Domain names
In addition to these generic domain names, each country has a higher level domain name called country code Top Level Domain names (ccTLDs). For example, .ca stands for Canada, .ie represents Ireland, and .ir shows a domain in Iran. It should be pointed that two names at the second-level domain name cannot co-exist under the same first-level domain name, hence making each domain name unique to its owner. For example, although Delta Faucet and Delta Airlines companies should have a name similar to delta.com, only one Delta company can have the ownership of delta.com domain name. The legal claims that are raised for domain names are mainly made for the second-level names.
How are Domain Names registered in Iran?
The policy making and management of domain names at a global level is done by a non-profit organization called ICANN. This institute guarantees the specification of an internet protocol (IP) for a space in internet, the delivering of the IP address for a high level domain name, and the management of root servers.
For registering a domain name, a request should be sent to domain registration organizations. The nic (www.nic.ir) institute which works under the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM) performs this task in Iran.
Click on the link below to read more:
Comments
Post a Comment