Cyfrowe pole bitwy: strona internetowa spółki jako miejsce publikacji ogłoszeń a spory domenowe i korporacyjne

Abstrakt

In Article 5 § 5 of the Commercial Companies Code, the legislature imposes on joint-stock companies and limited joint-stock partnerships the obligation to maintain their own websites and to publish on them announcements required by law and the statutes of the companies. However, a number of detailed issues related to the determination of the address of such a website and its functioning have not been regulated, including such a fundamental issue as the method to determine what is or is not a company’s website within the meaning of the above-mentioned provision. In practice, shareholders generally assume that the website will be the one located at the address appearing in the National Court Register. Although such a conclusion seems logical, it does not clearly result from the applicable legal regulations. However, this circumstance takes on particular signifi cance in cases where a corporate dispute overlaps with a dispute over the company’s internet domain. Such cases provoke questions such as what requirements (e.g. in terms of hosting, domain registration, actual control, etc.) must be met for a website to be considered the company’s ‘own’ within the meaning of Article 5 § 5 ; whether a company can maintain (and alternatively use) more than one website for the publication of advertisements; from when a change of a company’s website address is eff ective; and what the corporate consequences are of a company losing control over the content of its website. Th e subject of this article is analysis of the above issues and an attempt to provide answers to the questions presented. The entire discussion is crowned with conclusions de lege ferenda.