Employer vicariously liable for passing off through domain name registrations

In Vertical Leisure Limited v Poleplus Limited, the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court has found an employer to be vicariously liable for passing off arising from its employee’s registration of a number of domains which infringed the IP rights of the claimant. It held that registering the domain names was the kind of act the employee was employed to do and, in doing so, he was furthering his employer’s interest rather than his own.