Last week, the World Intellectual Property Organization Arbitration and Mediation Center (WIPO) dismissed the complaint filed by Hromadske TV against their former CEO, Mr. Roman Skrypin. Therefore, “hromadske.tv” domain name is fully owned by Mr. Skrypin. Dmytro Gadomsky and Lidiya Klymkiv represented Mr. Skrypin in the dispute.

“Startups have lately become very trendy in Ukraine, while it is not trendy at all to settle the issues with business partners amicably. Delving into someone’s dirty laundry is as a rule an unrewarding job, but sometimes it’s a necessary evil. We have provided legal support to Roman, and at the very beginning, we have noticed the two nuances of extreme delicacy. We suppose, we should tell about them. The most subtle nuance is whether it is required to execute any agreement for the project to obtain a domain name (this case involves the NGO). The second nuance is the opportunism that was unexpectedly indicated by the arbiter with regard to Mr. Skrypin’s actions.

What happens with assets in case the project has never succeeded? Someone brought a printer unit, someone gave away the savings, someone created a logo, and stuff like that. Are all those people entitled to take their printer units, or money, or other property after they have left the project? There is no obvious answer, given that there are no written agreements.

The parties to this dispute had no agreements concerning Mr. Skrypin’s obligations to transfer the domain name. Anyway, the parties were unable to demonstrate any written evidence to the court. The person who brought the printing unit, could take it back for sure (if the case was about the printing unit instead of the domain name). But it’s not all that simple with the domain name”, commented Lidiya Klymkiv, Associate, Axon Partners.

Case Files:

The Decision

The Response submitted by Mr. Roman Skrypin

Read more in the article by Lidiya Klymkiv here