問25
頻出度★★★
他社に損害を与える目的で, 他社のサービス名と類似したドメイン名を取得して使用するような行為を禁止している法律はどれか。
平成25年度 春期 ITパスポート試験 問25
ストラテジ系法務 › 知的財産権
This question's explanation and your answers so far.
解説
問 25
Incorrectア
The Act on the Protection of Personal Information imposes obligations on businesses that handle personal information: specifying the purpose of use and notifying or announcing it, restricting use beyond that purpose, taking security control measures, restricting provision to third parties, responding to requests from the individual for disclosure or correction, and so on. What it protects is information about living individuals, so a company's service name and the acquisition or use of a domain name fall outside its scope, and it cannot serve as the basis for prohibiting the act in this question.
Incorrectイ
The Telecommunications Business Act regulates the business operations of the side that provides communications services: registration and notification of telecommunications carriers, fair provision of services, protection of the secrecy of communications, and the like. It is not a set of provisions dealing with competitive issues between businesses, such as who acquires and uses a domain name and for what purpose.
Incorrectウ
The Act on Prohibition of Unauthorized Computer Access prohibits logging in to a computer over a network by using another person's ID and password without permission, evading usage restrictions by exploiting security holes, and wrongfully obtaining or providing IDs and passwords without authorization. The act of acquiring and using a domain name does not in itself break through an access control function, so it is not among the acts this law prohibits.
- エ
正解 The correct answer is エ, the Unfair Competition Prevention Act. To secure fair competition among businesses, this law prohibits acts such as free-riding on another party's indications of goods or business (product names, service names, trademarks, company names, and so on) and infringing trade secrets, treating them as “unfair competition,” and it provides the grounds for injunction claims and claims for damages. One of the categories of such unfair competition is the “wrongful acquisition of domain names”: acquiring, holding, or using a domain name identical or similar to another party's indication of goods or business, for the purpose of obtaining an unlawful gain (profit-seeking purpose) or of causing damage to another party (harm-causing purpose), is expressly prohibited. This question describes exactly that category — “with the intent of causing damage to another company” and “acquiring and using a domain name similar to another company's service name” — so the law that applies is the Unfair Competition Prevention Act. Incidentally, such acts are generally called cybersquatting (the wrongful occupation of domain names).
ここがポイント
- The Unfair Competition Prevention Act prohibits, as unfair competition, misappropriating another party's indications of goods or business, infringing trade secrets, and acquiring, holding, or using a similar domain name for the purpose of unlawful gain or of causing harm (cybersquatting), and it makes injunction claims and claims for damages possible.
- Distinguish the scope of the confusable laws: the Act on the Protection of Personal Information covers the proper handling of personal information, the Telecommunications Business Act covers the business conduct of telecommunications carriers, and the Act on Prohibition of Unauthorized Computer Access covers unauthorized logins that use another person's ID, password, and the like; none of them deals with unfair competitive acts involving domain names.
用語