In this case the company, Alliance Francaise de Londres Ltd (AF) was using a domain name registered to a company that had dissolved. In accordance with our terms and conditions in force at the time, this would lead to the domain name being cancelled unless the party using the domain name obtained a court order of the relevant sort.

We said that if AF provided a court document showing that they were in the process of making this sort of application, we would not cancel the domain name pending the outcome of the court proceedings.

AF was in the process of making the required court application, and confirmed this to us. However, they asked for an undertaking that the domain name would not be cancelled. We explained that we had marked the domain name as "Do No Cancel" but declined to give an 'undertaking'. An 'undertaking' for a solicitor is a serious step because if the undertaking is broken, even if it is not your fault, you can be disciplined by the Law Society.

AF seemed unhappy with this, and despite being told that there was nothing more that could be done (or even would be done, even if an injunction was obtained) they applied to the the court for an injunction on wide ranging terms.

By the day of the hearing they decided to withdraw the application, but argued that they should not have to pay our costs of the application because it was a perfectly sensible application to make, because they thought that we would only have made some paper note about the cancellation.

The judge rejected this saying that it was obvious, given the context and correspondence that the 'Do Not Cancel' marking was electronic, and that to the extent it was not obvious, it could have been cleared up by asking. He awarded costs against AF.

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