Adidas achieves the provisional blocking of four “.es” domain names
On April 30th this year Adidas was granted a preliminary injunction by means of Auto No. 195/12, issued by the Commercial Court No. 2 of Barcelona, aimed at provisionally impede the continuation of the alleged violation of the plaintiff’s trademark rights. The decision establishes the provisional blocking of four web sites under the “.es” domain name through which, in the Court’s view, Adidas’ trademark rights were being blatantly infringed.
It is well known that Adidas is a major manufacturer, among other products, of football t-shirts of national football teams and also of many of the most important teams in the world. T-shirts of Real Madrid, AC Milan, Chelsea or Liverpool and of national football teams like those of Spain, Germany or Argentina, just to name a few, are actually involved in this case. The fact is that accurate replicas of some of the most renowned football t-shirts manufactured by Adidas were being commercialised through the domain names at issue. The magistrate José María Ribelles considered the abovementioned facts sufficient grounds for the preliminary injunction to be granted. But even more, the magistrate was concerned with the fact that the alleged infringers were domiciled in China but there were no evidences of their physical addresses. The magistrate issued an injunction addressed to RED.ES (the Spanish public entity managing “.es” domain names) to cancel those domain names and therefore to impide access to the web sites. The court did so on the basis of two norms, namely Article 135 Spanish Patent Law and on the 6th Additional Provision of the Spanish e-Commerce Law (LSSI).
But more important that this is that, subsidiarily, in case this measure is not effective, the court will issue injunctions addressed to the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) operating in Spain to block access of the controversial domain names. This complementary measure is very important to avoid situations such as the one of “rojadirecta.com”, where US authorities ordered the blocking of the “.com” and “.org” domain names but the website kept operating under different ccTLD. In the present case, in case the defendants use the same strategy, at least they will not be able to provide their illegal services in Spain.
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