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Irish Companies with an online presence will get some comfort from a recent decision of the High Court upholding the terms of use of Ryanair's website and the enforceability of the jurisdiction clause contained in them.

The matter for consideration in Ryanair Ltd. v. Billigfluege.de GmbH (26^th February 2010) was whether the German firm which employed “screen scraping” techniques to display Ryanair flight information on its own website could be held to have accepted Ryanair's terms of use. Following from this was whether the German company was bound by Ryanair's selection of the Irish Courts as the appropriate jurisdiction for any disputes regarding the use of the website as opposed to letting the matter be decided by the Brussels regulation which would have nominated Germany.

In a reasoned judgment, Judge Hanna relied on a number of US cases, notably Specht v. Netscape where Judge Sotomayor (who has since been nominated to the US Supreme Court by President Obama) stated: “Reasonably conspicuous notice of the existence of contract terms and unambiguous manifestation of assent to those terms by consumers are essential if electronic bargaining is to have integrity and credibility”. The High Court Judge also referred to the US case of Register.com v. Verio Inc, where it was accepted that there was no need to click an “I accept” button, but that as with traditional contract principles the repeated use of the website in the knowledge of the existence of terms of use was sufficient to bind the user.

Judge Hanna also noted that the use of information on a website constitutes consideration for the purposes of the law of contract.

As a result of this ruling website operators can be more certain that the Irish Courts will uphold the validity of their terms of use provided they comply with normal principles of contract law and are placed in a reasonably conspicuous place on the website. Furthermore it is clear that Irish companies can nominate the Irish Courts to deal with disputes, even where the defendant is located abroad provided such is provided for in their terms of use.

Full text of judgment available here