Tjandra facing four-month jail term demand

Muninggar Sri Saraswati The Jakarta Post Jakarta

A former manager of local cosmetic giant PT Martina Berto, charged with illegally registering the domain name MustikaRatu.com after the company's main competitor PT Mustika Ratu, should be jailed for four months, the prosecution have demanded.

Defendant Tjandra Sugiono, 32, should also pay a fine of Rp 30 million, prosecutor Y.N. Eddy told the Central Jakarta District Court on Thursday.

The case is the first cybercrime ever tried in Indonesia.

"The fact that the defendant had registered a popular domain name without asking permission from the owner indicates an unfair business competition," Eddy told the hearing presided over by judge Chasiany R. Tandjung.

The defendant was charged with violating Article 382 of the Criminal Code on fraudulent competition, and Article 48 of the Antimonopoly Law No. 5/1999 which requires a business party not ban its competitor's consumers from making business contact with the rival.

According to the prosecutor, Tjandra registered domain name MustikaRatu.com on October 1999. PT Martina Berto was identified as the registrant while Tjandra acted as the administrative and billing contact.

The MustikaRatu.com website would lead visitors to the Belia- Online.com website displaying Belia cosmetics, a product of PT Martina for teenagers, Eddy said.

Tjandra admitted that he registered the domain name for financial benefit, Eddy said, but he had never offered PT Mustika rights to the domain name, until he resigned from PT Martina in June 2000.

It is common among Internet users that domain names to be sold to other interested parties for financial benefit, he said.

Eddy said several overseas business partners of PT Mustika, including Abdul Rahman Zohaifi and Bros Co in Arab Saudi and Malaysian company Medical Supplies, became confused as when they clicked the domain name, they found Belia products, instead of PT Mustika products.

"Because of what the defendant did, PT Mustika lost more than Rp 10 billion following a significant decrease in business transactions with its business partners," he said.

Tjandra had withdrawn the domain name in Sept. 2000, after Martha Tilaar, the owner of PT Martina, ordered him to do so.

That the defendant had never offered the name to PT Mustika to buy strengthened the demanded sentence while the mitigating factor was that the defendant regretted the crime.

The case is the second legal battle related to the two local cosmetic giants. The first dispute occurred last year when PT Mustika filed a complaint against PT Martina over the right to use the trade mark "Taman Sari".

PT Mustika won the battle after the directorate general for intellectual and property rights ruled the name belonged to Mustika Ratu as it had registered the name with authorities before PT Martina had.