The District Court of Amsterdam has held that the unauthorized use of a company's trademark in a domain name, which was linked to a web site providing information concerning the trademark owner, constitutes trademark and trade name infringement.

Seven plaintiffs, including four banks and two insurance companies, brought an action for trademark and trade name infringement against a company which provided intermediary and advisory services to traders in derivatives, options and futures. The defendant had registered the plaintiffs' trademarks as domain names in the arguably most desirable ".COM" top level domain category for the purpose of providing investors with information on products of the respective trademark owners.

The Court held that the use of the plaintiffs' trademarks in domain names which referred Internet users to a working web site constituted commercial use of the domain name as a trademark under the Benelux Trademark Act and as a trade name under the Dutch Trade Names Act, and that such use either caused, or could cause, harm or loss to the plaintiffs, since persons who accessed the web sites would wrongly believe that the information emanated directly from the trademark owners.

The Court also found that the defendant had engaged in an act of misrepresentation since the impression was given that the domain names were owned by the respective plaintiffs or that they were somehow involved. Further, the registration of the domain names deprived the plaintiffs of the possibility to register the names themselves.

The Court ordered the defendant to cease using the domain names and to transfer ownership of the domain names to the respective plaintiffs.