Internet Law

Domain name ownership rights

In my last post, I talked about the problem facing my company regarding our domain name, basically, some IT guy who worked with our company as IT consultant decided to register our company domain under his name, and now he is black mailing us, asking us to pay him money in order for him to release the domain to us.

This case got me thinking about the latest development in this field, what the law says about domain names? Are they protected by any copy rights? If the company business name is officially registered with the local chamber of commerce or the local court, would that automatically give them the rights over companyname.com domain name?

We all heard in the early ages of the internet about how big corporations would pay millions for domain names; Is there any development on the legal side of this issue?

How can we re-claim our domain name?

I have a legal question concerning the ownership of a domain name.

While back our company setup e-mail accounts and registered its domain name. The person who did the accounts setup and domain registration was an IT consultant who was hired by some of our company’s managers, at that time, no one at the company new much about domain name registrations or about IT in general.

Now when I was trying to setup our company’s website I found out that the IT consultant registered the domain name under his own company name and not our company name. When I contacted the IT consultant and asked him how come he registered the domain name under his own company name and not under ours, he said “no one at your company cared”, and when I asked him to release the domain name to us, he sent me a long bill and said he wont transfer the domain to us unless we pay our bills. Keep in mind he is still hosting our e-mail accounts and we work with very big government agencies and for security and confidentiality, our e-mail accounts must be hosted under our own company name.

My questions are:
1- Are there any laws that regulate these matters?
2- We have proof that we have paid him for his services. Will that bind him to release the domain to us, will the domain reseller take this as a proof that the domain belongs to us?
3- He is hosting our company’s e-mail accounts up to this moment, and we use them daily, will the domain reseller or domain registrar take this as a proof that we are paying this IT consultant and he actually took advantage of our company’s staff members not being IT savvy and registered the ownership of the Domain and the e-mail accounts under his name?
4- The last thing I may add, I have asked this IT consultant “Are you trying to make money out of us by trying to sell to us our own domain name? and his answer was “YES.”