British political parties get dragged into Web site dispute

UK political parties are failing to protect their online reputations after an investigation by Silicon.com revealed numerous cases of "passing-off".

Any users who type in http://labour-party.co.uk will be logged in to the official Liberal Democrats Web site. The same happens in reverse when users type in http://www.liberal-democrats.co.uk.

The Labour Party - whose official site is http://www.labour.org.uk - has also had both 'labour-party.org' and 'labour-party.org.uk' registered by organisations who intend to set up unofficial sites devoted to critiques or satires of the Labour Party.

The Conservative Party has also been hit, with URLs similar to its official http://www.conservative-party.org.uk pointing to groups like the Pro-Euro Conservatives.

Sacha Wheeler, director of the Liberal Democrats' Web design company, Thought Interactive, said the party was not intending to pursue the matter.

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said: "It's a spoof by someone - we know not who."

But Silicon.com was able to obtain this information within half an hour. The LibLab swap was created by a man named Tim Harvey, who questioned whether or not his swap was hurting anyone. "The use of .co.uk would never be used by political organisations as the 'co' stands for companies," he responded. "Political sites are told to use .org in their nomenclature to differentiate politics from retail and profit."

A spokeswoman for the Conservative Party said that because its name is not copyrighted, the party's hands are tied. "Although this doesn't please us, there is very little we can do," she admitted. "It's so widespread that we just play each one by ear. As people bring them to our attention, we look into each issue, and some do receive a solicitor's letter."

Nick Lockett, solicitor with Sidley and Austin, commented that the LibLab case most likely falls within existing case law on passing-off. "Either these are the official sites or they are designed to pass-off the official sites or to cause mischief," he said.

Lockett added that the courts would probably order the sites to be handed over if need be.