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."

Comments

WHOA!

[sandstorming]

Thank god I didn't register that domain... I was going to... but I decided with http://www.mycrowsoft.com Crisis averted!

Evil Milka!

[Harald74]

On top of everything: Their site is a Web-trap! No "back" button for me! Aaargh!

OMFG

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:OMFG

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

Man, I thought France was about freedom and justice.

You're thinking of Iraq!

Re:OMFG

[The-Perl-CD-Bookshel]

Anyone who has seen The Holy Grail knows that taunting is quite an effective strategy in France.

Bad, but Not Too Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Kraft owns Milka?

[MunchMunch]

I spent a year in Austria around 1996 and, coming from America where you have Hershey's or the highway, Milka was like rediscovering chocolate. Compared to it, America chocolate tasted sort of chalky and brittle at best, 1984-style-chocolate-ration at worst.

So when did Kraft buy it? Does this mean it's gonna get worse?

Re:Kraft owns Milka?

[ghoti]

Milka is the Microsoft of the European chocolate market. They are trying to push everybody else out, shamelessly copy other products, and all their products taste exactly the same. What's the point of buying chocolate easter bunnies when they taste exactly like the bar of chocolate you buy all year? Damn those big fucking companies, I want my variety back!

Re:Kraft owns Milka?

[dunkelfalke]

as someone living in germany i say milka sucks.

even the cheapest german chocolate is better than milka.

if you want to try a really good chocolate, try lindt

Re:Kraft owns Milka?

[Katchina'404]

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...

Re:Kraft makes good chocolate? Doubtful.

[buzzcutbuddha]

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.

Not a designer

[Max von H.]

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.

Thing is, in France, trademark law will prevail when it comes to .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.

Country TLDs ownership rules differ from country to country, unlike the usual .com .org .net .info .biz so don't scream if you haven't read the legal mumbojumbo above the "I agree" button!

Re:Not a designer

[VdG]

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.

Re:Not a designer

[joebok]

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.

ah .. the food companies..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Similar color schemes, sure.

[jonadab]

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.

Re:Kraft makes good chocolate? Doubtful.

[seti]

Finest chocolate?

You must eat some pretty shitty chocolate if you call Milka the "finest".

Re:Kraft makes good chocolate? Definitely!

[VdG]

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

[ltrm]

Cadbury isn't American its English. http://www.cadbury.co.uk/EN/CTB2003/about_chocolat e/history_cadbury/

It's an outrage

[slushbat]

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.

Translation:

[elgatozorbas]

The French text says that Milka complained that the colours of her website looked too much like theirs. They did not negotiate, but gave her an ultimatum [to give the site to them, it becomes clear later].

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.

Re:Judicial not product confusion

[Raphael]

But why does the chocolate company NEED the French site ?

In order to fill a gap in Europe?

• www.milka.at (Austria)
• www.milka.be (Belgium)
• www.milka.de (Germany)
• www.milka.es (Spain)
• www.milka.fr (France) - bad!
• www.milka.gr (Greece)
• www.milka.co.il (Ireland)
• www.milka.it (Italy)
• www.milka.lu (Luxemburg)
• www.milka.nl (Netherlands)
• www.milka.com.pt (Portugal)
• www.milka.co.uk (United Kingdom)

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.

Re:Kraft makes good chocolate? Doubtful.

[Raphael]

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).

Hey guys. Milka's her NAME!

[crovira]

Milka Budimir.

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 /. 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."

The internet tries to flatten too many regionalisms into too few TLDs. Its a stupid system of nomenclature.

Re:Judicial not product confusion

[Raphael]

I just realized that I missed an important one:

• www.milka.tm.fr (France)

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.

Reminds me of many years ago.

[sgant]

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.

Re:Reminds me of many years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar problem after I registered my surname as a domain name. Except in my case, I happen to have the unfortunate last name "HotTeenBitches."

At least that's what I told the judge.

Did anyone read anything at all?

[Stalyn]

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.

I've got your suggestion right here

[sunhou]

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.