Bundesgerichtshof decides in favour of the .de registry in the "kurt-biedenkopf.de" case

The former minister-president of the German federal state of Saxony, Kurt Biedenkopf, has lost his case before the German Supreme Court (the "Bundesgerichtshof"). This judgement from the highest court in the land confirms the earlier ones handed down by the lower courts, where the plaintiff had sought to obtain a court order against the registry, DENIC, forcing it to "block" the domain "kurt-biedenkopf.de", in such a way that nobody (not even Biedenkopf himself) would ever be able to register it.

In its judgement, for which the written reasoning has not yet been made public, the German Supreme Court has definitively turned down Biedenkopf's request, following the line it had already established in its "ambiente.de" judgement. The essence of this is that DENIC is not subject to any obligation to check for possible clashes with third-party rights either before or during the registration process. It would, however, not be possible for DENIC to "block" a domain without performing such a check, and it would also run counter to the general registration principle of "first come, first served".

Attorney Stephan Welzel, the head of DENIC's legal department, has welcomed the judgement: "the Federal Court has thrown out the idea that DENIC ought to 'block' domains as a means of preventing possible breaches of the law or infringements of the rights of others. Anyone who wants to stop particular domains being used by others can and must register them for themselves – and that even applies to someone who used to be minister-president of Saxony."