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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.
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.
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.
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