Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v. Chen

Richard Chen (defendant) was a resident of the United States who registered and used the domain name sydneyopera.org. The sydneyopera.org website contained information that was misleading to consumers; for example, the site falsely claimed that visitors could buy tickets through the site for events at the Sydney Opera House. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) (plaintiff) filed suit under the Trade Practices Act, seeking an injunction to prevent Chen from allowing consumers in Australia to access the sydneyopera.org website. The trial court granted a preliminary injunction, but the ACCC was unable to serve Chen and did not receive a response to its attempts to contact him. Chen did not participate in the litigation, but the disputed content was removed from the website, the domain name expired, and a different user registered the domain name. It was unclear whether the user was connected to Chen. The ACCC conceded that Chen might not obey an Australian court’s injunction and that there was no mechanism for the Australian court to enforce an injunction against him. The ACCC argued that there were strong policy reasons for granting an injunction: the court should protect the public from the increasingly numerous cross-border deceptive practices; the court should support the ACCC’s attempts to protect the public; and agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission were more likely to cooperate with the ACCC’s efforts with a court order in place.