Arun Jaitley moves Delhi High Court over www.arunjaitley.com

Senior Advocate and prominent BJP leader Arun Jaitley has moved the Delhi High Court to prohibit the ongoing auction of www.arunjaitley.com. Network Solutions, a web hosting company owned the domain name www.arunjaitley.com..Jaitley had apparently approached the website for the ownership of the domain when he was told that the domain name was ‘pending deletion’. Soon after, however, the domain name was put back on sale for a price of $14,445 (Rs. 6,93,000). On August 27, the domain name was transferred to a company called Portfolio Brains, a domain name auction website..Pratibha Singh, counsel for Arun Jaitley told mediapersons that “the domain name clearly belongs to him and the 61 pages of Google that contain information about him is an indication of this”. She added that “the company had prevented him from registering the website and were unlawfully holding the domain name”..In fact, when Bar & Bench checked on the ownership of similar domain names, www.arunjaitely.in, turned out to belong to one Devaraj, of Nungambakam, Chennai..Bar & Bench researched on some prominent legal personalities to determine who owned their domain names..Here are the results of our research on Whois.com..For example, www.cyrilshroff.com, www.jyotisagar.com are still available. Rajiv Luthra and Zia Mody have been rather more proactive, registering their respective domain names www.rajivkluthra.com and www.ziamody.com, as the property of their law firms..The domain names for Senior Advocates Fali Nariman (www.falinariman.com), Soli Sorabjee (www.solisorabjee.com) and Harish Salve (www.harishsalve.com) are all still available and anybody can purchase them..Arun Jaitley was unavailable for comment. Indian companies and Indians have been fighting to protect their domain names. Mahindra, Tata and others have approached various High Courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization for suitable protection in the past.