Paris (AFP)

One site can hide another: the very popular portal for help with vaccination against Covid-19 "Vite Ma Dose" is imitated online by an eponymous site, which promotes a "vaccine-prudent" discourse.

Frequent on the web, disputes for misappropriation of address affect more than a hundred companies each year in France.

Founded at the beginning of April by the engineer Guillaume Rozier and maintained since thanks to a hundred volunteers, the official site "Vite Ma Dose" (https://vitemadose.covidtracker.fr/) allows to visualize at a glance the niches available for vaccination on the various appointment platforms (Doctolib, Keldoc, Maiia, etc.). Its application on smartphones is among the most downloaded in France.

But on the Web, another almost similar address ("vitemadose" followed by ".fr"), refers to a page which does not offer any vaccination appointment.

On the contrary, it expresses reservations about the current vaccination campaign, by posting, for several days this week, a video of the biologist Christian Vélot evoking the "potential risks of the new generation of vaccines" and presenting itself as "vaccino-prudent ".

This address was reserved from April 3, 2021 to the nose and beard of Guillaume Rozier, who had left it vacant.

Mr. Rozier denounces a "usurpation" and prepares "all possible procedures" to recover it, he told AFP.

"All I care about is that people find the right site. But I don't know how that can evolve", the owner of this eponymous address "could make people pay, rip them off for example", suppose the 'computer engineer.

If the registration of a domain name (web address) costs only 4.80 €, a site can be sold very expensive.

Mr. Rozier claims to have seen in April advertisements attempting to resell the offending address for "6,000 euros".

He tried, but in vain, to buy it back at cost price from whoever originally registered it.

- "Cybersquatting" -

This kind of misadventure is common in the business world or among personalities, whose name is used as a web address at their expense, explains Pierre Bonis, director of Afnic, the French association in charge of name management. domain ending in .fr.

In addition to traditional, longer legal proceedings, Afnic settles hundreds of disputes of this type each year, 80% of which concern companies.

After two months of review, Afnic's decisions may result in the permanent deletion of the site, or its reassignment to the complainant who requests it, with supporting evidence.

Because on the web, if the "general principle of first come, first served" prevails in use, "it is not the Wild West either", explains lawyer Alexandre Archambault, digital specialist.

French law punishes "cybersquatting", assimilated to ransom, in cases where a domain name is reserved with the aim of reselling it at a higher price to its legitimate owner.

It also prohibits identity theft or the use of addresses too close to the name of State institutions or services.

If a domain name is likely to infringe "public order" or "intellectual property", it can also be deleted or reassigned.

In this second case, the complainant will have to demonstrate, for example, that he had filed a trademark of the same name before the registration of the contested site, that we sought to take advantage of its notoriety or attempted to harm it, explains Me Archambault. .

But to avoid this kind of procedure, sometimes complex, the best way for a company is to "reserve 4 or 5 domain names, with the variants, by adding a dash for example" and "never communicate" on a project of site "before having registered it", warns Mr. Bonis.

© 2021 AFP