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French Designer Ordered to Give up milka.fr
jmf writes "The BBC is running a story about French designer Milka Budumir, who has been ordered by a judge to give up milka.fr to Kraft Foods. You can read her side of the story (in French) at her site which also points to Kraft's side of the story. Kraft make very good chocolate, but they seem to be colour-blind: claiming that this website's colour is similar to this one's."
Kraft Deutschland owns the Milka brand, which is one of the finest varieties of chocolate in Germany.
I believe they purchased the brand after it was well-establishee but that doesn't matter at this point, as Kraft's name is on the letterhead.
Milka Budumir isn't a designer... She's just a seamstress who got her name / domain name given to her by her son for her birthday. It's not like she has a brand to defend ; OTOH she's not causing Kraft any harm.
.fr domain names, which were only available to registered companies with a trademark brand name (you had to show paperwork), which certainly explains this ruling.
.com .org .net .info .biz so don't scream if you haven't read the legal mumbojumbo above the "I agree" button!
Thing is, in France, trademark law will prevail when it comes to
Country TLDs ownership rules differ from country to country, unlike the usual
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Kraft also own a wide range of other chocolate brands, including Toblerone, Cote d'Or (one of my personal favourites, especially the one with pecans) and Suchard.
Cadbury isn't American its English. http://www.cadbury.co.uk/EN/CTB2003/about_chocolat e/history_cadbury/
At the moment their "friendly" solution is to pay for the costs of taking the domain milka.fr from the lady and offering her milkacouture.fr, which is useless to her, because her clients don't know it. She also does not understand why they complain, because she did not do them any damage. Milka claims there is a link between the ladies site and www.food.fr, whish sells pizzas in Valence.
She also says that her site will not lead away internetters who look for the chocolate company, because she only appears as 41th on search engines.
She concludes to say that KRAFT never wanted the best for both parties, and only wanted her to give up the domain name, and only after a struggle of 2 years they are prepared to reimburse her the costs she has made.
In order to fill a gap in Europe?
Note that they don't have most of the nordic countries nor the new members of the EU. Hint: many of these domains are open for registration!
Most of these sites redirect to the corresponding Kraft Foods site for that country, or to the globak www.kraft.com.
-Raphaël
Côte d'Or is owned by Kraft as well. You can see it by looking around on http://www.cotedor.be/ or directly on http://www.kraftfoods.be/. Fortunately, they haven't changed the products in any significant way so they still taste good.
I would also also recommend trying Galler chocolate (not owned by Kraft Foods - yet).
-Raphaël
I just realized that I missed an important one:
Until a few years ago, companies that had trademarks in France were supposed to register their domains under .tm.fr. Apparently, Kraft did register www.milka.tm.fr.
But since the rules have changed (around 2002, I think) the company has been trying to get the domain that had been registered by that lady in the meantime.
-Raphaël
Things ARE going to get worse, as Europe as decided a little while ago that the name chocolate would be allowed for products containing other vegetal oils than cocoa butter (i.e. soy bean, etc). Until then, in some countries chocolate HAD to contain only cocoa butter.
;-)
In reaction, Belgium has created a new label "Ambao" which identifies chocolates containing only cocoa butter. I suppose (and hope) that similar initiatives have been taken in other countries where chocolate is taken seriously
See this article for details...
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