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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
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.
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.
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.
Finest chocolate?
You must eat some pretty shitty chocolate if you call Milka the "finest".
Coca-Cola, sometimes War.
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.
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