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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."
Thank god I didn't register that domain... I was going to... but I decided with http://www.mycrowsoft.com Crisis averted!
http://www.sandstorming.com
On top of everything: Their site is a Web-trap! No "back" button for me! Aaargh!
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
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?
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.
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.
Yes, *she* is some lady who touches up and adjusts clothes.
This is her one big chance at fame, let her bask in the spotlight.
Her site has been dormant for a couple of years now, its just recently with the media "interest" that shes spruced it up.
Mind you, it looks downright awful, but who am I to judge.
liqbase
Those colour schemes are similar, in the sense that both of them make heavy
use of garish, clashing, high-saturation colours that DON'T GO TOGETHER.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
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.
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.
Cadbury isn't American its English. http://www.cadbury.co.uk/EN/CTB2003/about_chocolat e/history_cadbury/
Personally I don't think this judgement goes nearly far enough. How can she get away with such blatant infringement of their trademark. Fancy trying to pass herself off as a chocolate bar. I think she should be forced to change her name immediately.
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
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.
The owner of the armani.it domain, a stamp maker from Milan (if I remember correctly) was forced, after years of legal battle, to resign the domain to the fashion designer (Armani).
Search on google "timbrificio armani" if you are interested and you can read italian.
Ciao, Renato
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.
Some years ago, before even the big dot-com boom and before the net was even popular, I had somehow registered www.gant.com. I mean, this was in the registration infancy when there were just a handfull of web sites. I honestly don't even remember registering it and at the time I though the Web was going to be a fad...ok, I never claimed to be a visionary. Besides, IRC-Gopher-Usenet-FTP WAS the Internet to me...again, at the time.
Anyway, to make a long story longer...the lawyers from Gant Shirts got ahold of me some years later demanding I release all claims on gant.com to them...but of course, I didn't mention that I didn't even remember registering it...but why muck up the water? So I wrote back and said, hey, it's my fricken name! How could I part with my name! Then I started channeling Arthur Millers "The Crucible" with "Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; LEAVE ME MY NAME!"
They cut a check for an even grand and I found I could part with my name pretty easily after all.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
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
Kraft had suggested that Mrs Budimir launch a new website under the domain name www.milkacouture.fr...
Mrs. Budimir should suggest that Kraft re-launch their own website, under the name www.butthead-astronomers-chocolate.fr.