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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."
I call BS. Find me one Kraft "chocolate" product where Chocolate or Cocoa butter is listed first ont he ingredients (i.e. the majority ingredient), or even then second or third one.... To be perfectly honest I have never seen a Kraft "chocolate" product, but I have seen their "cheese" prducts (and as a kid I ate them, but now they make me gag).
OK, so first this 'kraft' company doesnt register domains for all their brands on the country tld's. Then, *YEARS* later they go "oops, it's alreay taken! What should we do? Oh, thats right! Sue the bastard. Who is the bastard anyway? Ah!".
So they got away with their neglection by fixing it with a lawsuit. Man, I thought France was about freedom and justice.
How much business could the website be generating for her in the first place?
She should appeal, then settle. Go to the new suggested domain (milkacouture.fr) and have Kraft link her from Milka.fr with a brief note about the settlement.
Irregardless, I hope she has the sense to register the alternative (milkacouture) just in case. It's currently unreserved and prime for a squatter.
So when did Kraft buy it? Does this mean it's gonna get worse?
If you don't own "trademark" to your own name, something is really fucked up...
Besides, Milka-the-company owns their trademark only for chocolate and dairy products, it's available for all other uses. If a "script kiddie for hire" company in town A is named "Pwnage", this doesn't restrict a "bouncers for hire" company in town B from using the same name. In fact, giving one of them advantage over the other -- that is, any advantage other than preventing people from knowingly infringing an established name -- is just plain wrong. And show me how exactly the old lady's parents were knowingly abusing the company's name...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
She, not he. And she's a fashion designer, not a web designer, which is a big difference - next time you design a website, try to come up with the haute couture to go with it and you'll know what I mean. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I've got a slight interest in this, since Kraft are one of my customers and I used to work for them. However...
Most major companies are extremely interested in brand names. They see the brand name itself as more important than any individual product that's associated with it. They're always looking for new products to associate with succesful brands. It also means they get very concerned at any threat to the brand image.
In this particular case, Kraft are not in the clothing business, nor are they ever likely to be. But they *do* have interests in promotional items which might well include clothes.
The Milka brand has for a very long time been associated with a particular colour: a shade of lilac/purple. Compared side-by-side there's not much similarity between that and the milka.fr site. But milka.fr does use a sort of purple/mauve colour: someone going to that site might conceivably mistake it for the trade-marked colour - if they didn't have an example to hand - and think that the site was associated with the chocolate in some way.
I suspect that Kraft's objection is not so much that Ms Milka might make soome money out of it, but that their customers might wonder "why is Milka associated with this tatty little fashion site?", thus damaging the name.
Not a big risk, but if they let one site get away with it - however innocently - they leave themselves wide-open to future abuse.
Coming down on the side of big business isn't going to be popular around here, but I think that Kraft are quite justified in this case, provided that they don't get too heavy-handed.
This person WAS using her domain responsibly - she was not selling adulterated chocolate. What I would like to return to are the days before corporate personhood - I would like the rights of individuals to be more important than the rights of businesses.
And I don't really care if companies register every conceivable domain - actually, that seems like it would be a prudent practice to me.