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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."
german (food) companies are somewhat known to defend their trademarks. the most pathetic one was the trademark holder of "kinder" (= children) cracking down on everything with children in their product name. even funnier that courts rule in their favor most of the time too.
There is no trademark infringement - clearly a case of trademark overreach.
Many businesses share the same name as others.
It tells you everything on http://wipo.org.uk/
Possibly just some fellows without any true skills making sure their jobs are safe.
In a way they are administrative personell. And the primary goal of any administration is to grow, because it has no jsutification for its existence in the first place.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But why does the chocolate company NEED the French site ? Yes, it has a name of their product, but there are limited meaningful/nice/... names that can be used but millions of businesses around the world - just 'cos you are big doesn't mean that you can lay claim to all uses of what happens to be the name of your product(s) - follow that to conclusion and we will run out of names quite quickly. Every town in the UK seems to have an ABC taxi company - no problem at all.
Why not try to stop the use of the name outside the shop ? Well, they would fail; it is just that the judges are sufficiently confused to think that 'E-space' is different from 'physical-space' that they come up with these stupid decisions.
well, it's okay for supermarket chocolate, but it isn't worth proper Belgian choc's such as : Leonidas or Pierre Marcolini (or even good old Côte d'or is tastier)
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
Finest chocolate?
You must eat some pretty shitty chocolate if you call Milka the "finest".
Coca-Cola, sometimes War.
Kraft make very good chocolate
/.rs who have never eaten real food...um, the difference between working with OS X and Windoze 1.0. There. Thats stark enough!
Ummmm, wtf?
Kraft dont even make food let alone 'good chocolate'.
This is what real chocolate looks like; and the taste, as compared to the garbage made by Hersheys, Kraft and the like is like the difference between, oh, how can we describe it to the unitiated
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
She's got a shop (or at least it looks like she has from the photos). She may well have printed business cards/adverts etc with her website/email address on it, so she does have some form of brand to defend, and if the brand, and internet presence, is so important to Kraft, why did they not get round to doing something about registering in France before 2002?
IANAL, but doesn't trademark only apply to a specific industry? It doesn't seem likely that someone going to Milka Couture is going to believe that they've gone to Milka chocolate's clothing site.
If www.milkacouture.fr is acceptable, why would milkachocolat.fr not have been acceptable for them instead.
Would the sensible option in this kind of case be to go for a shared page that had "If you are looking for Milka chocolate, click here. If you are looking for Milka couture, click here"?
How many people named McDonald do you think there are in the world? Some proportion of them presumably run restaurants or similar. How many of them have the trademark on that name for that purpose in their jurisdiction?
What is supprising is that the court decided that such a different business infringed. Presumably French trademark law is very different from UK and US law.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
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).
Somewhat OT, but funny you should mention Kraft Cheese products. You would be correct to assume that the process and many ingredients would be unrecognizable to fine cheesemakers of the world. I can't go into detail (NDAs and such) but I have personally written the PLC, HMI, and database code that controls the entire cheese-making process at their largest North-American facility. If any of you get the chance to work in industrial automation/engineering, take it. There's a lot of fascinating stuff, particularly in food production.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Milka Budimir.
/. because his "nom de plume" is Taco and they wan't it. "In fact its owned by "Technical Advisors COmpany" and looks like pre-eaten tacos."
She can't even use her NAME as a web site. Where's the justice in that?
Kraft might as well tell Taco he can't run
The internet tries to flatten too many regionalisms into too few TLDs. Its a stupid system of nomenclature.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
near-top level Domain names are for companies, organizations, corporations, or persons.
NOT for Product names, be they medicines, foods, movies.
getting a domain name should involve faxing a copy of an offical document, such as drivers license/birth cert., business license, charitable organization license, etc appropriate for the domain in question.
Squatting a domain in the .fr TLD takes a bit more work than doing the same in the .com one, actually.
You need to have a registered business with the same (or a close one) name to be allowed to apply for it.
You can't go wrong with Ritter Sport. All kinds of Schokolade goodness in 100g squares...
/drool
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
translation from kraft
- Within the framework of a friendly solution, our company does not claim any sum with Mrs. Budimir. In a new mail addressed on last 17 November, we proposed to take responsibility for our the expenses related on the deposit and the administration of the site "milka.fr" of its creation so far.
- We also proposed to Mrs. Budimir to take responsibility for our the deposit of the domain name "milkacouture.fr" which corresponds to the sign of its stores. This name would guarantee to Mrs. Budimir to continue to develop its activities and to inform its customers without creating confusion with our mark.
Milka Budimir's response
This proposal is entirely unfavourable for me because my customers, local
primarily, knows me under the name of Milka, and that the possible ones
customers would have by no means the reflex to seek "milkacouture".
My response
If her customers are local namely those who are in walking distance of her store.. then why does she need a website at all. Unless her website is more about her store then the store itself. Therefore a change in domain name will not hurt her financially at all.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I lived in Germany 10 years ago. Milka was to German chocolate what Hershey's is to American chocolate: cheap, fatty and relatively tasteless. That's a fair description of Milka chocolate, too.
Lindt is among my favorites. Even a Cadbury Dark bar is better chocolate than Milka.