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

Abstract

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 significance 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 effective; and what the corporate consequences are of a company losing control over the content of its website. The 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.