The High Court has not yet ordered the domain names themselves to be transferred to the company and will wait to do so until it has heard the agent's arguments, it said.
The agent, identified in the High Court ruling only as a Mr Frater, acted as an agent for Lifestyle Management, financial advisers to UK ex-pats living in Africa.
Frater's contract to work with Lifestyle Management was terminated and he claimed he was owed commission by the company. The company disagrees.
Lifestyle Management operates a website at offshorelsm.com. Frater registered the addresses offshorelsm.net, offshorelsm.org and offshorelsm.co.uk, the Court said. Lifestyle Management objected to the material hosted at those addresses.
"If one goes to these websites there is on at least one of them a home page that bears a very close resemblance to the home page of [Lifestyle Management's] website" said the HIgh Court ruling. "On one, if not both, of the others [Frater] has set out confidential extracts of [Lifestyle Management's] presentation (or method of presentation) to clients and a photograph of the members of [its] staff."
"These websites contain material that it is arguably defamatory of [Lifestyle Management] and which is certainly calculated to damage their business," it said.
Lifestyle Management accused Frater of engaging in 'reverse passing off', meaning that he was deceiving users into going to websites they thought belonged to Lifestyle Management and then published material there that was designed to damage the company.
The ruling said that emails produced by Lifestyle Management made it clear that Frater would 'cybersquat' on the domain names until he was paid what he said he was owed.
Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart said that if he was going to order the taking down of the allegedly offending content he would have to be satisfied that Lifestyle Management had a reputation or goodwill in the domain name; that Frater was trying to mislead viewers into thinking his websites were the company's; and that Frater's activity damaged Lifestyle Management. He said he was satisfied that these conditions were met.
Frater lives in Scotland and Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart said that it was not clear that the courts of England and Wales had the jurisdiction to hear the case.
Schedule 4 to the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgements Act says that a UK person should be sued in the part of the country where they live, with certain exceptions. One of those exceptions is that a suit can take place in "the place where the harmful event occurred or may occur".
Lifestyle Management argued that the courts of England and Wales should hear the case because potential clients of the company in England and Wales could visit the websites and be deceived by what they saw.
"This, [Lifestyle Management] submits, is a harmful event within the meaning of rule 3(c) of Schedule 4 of the 1982 Act with the result that the claimants can sue [Frater] in the courts of England and Wales," said the ruling.
The Court ruled that Frater must direct the domain names to blank pages and that he must not make use of, and must return, the confidential client database belonging to Lifestyle Management that it claimed he had.
"I am not prepared to make the order requiring [Frater] to relinquish his interest in the three websites that I have identified, or to transfer the domain names to [Lifestyle Management], without giving [Frater] an opportunity to be heard," said the ruling.
