US Food Corporation Kraft Gets Milka.fr
The BBC reports that US food corporation Kraft won Milka.fr from French fashion designer Milka Budimir. The principle of large companies protecting their trademarks and brands in ccltds is an old one. Many cctlds now have dispute resolution procedures that are based on ICANN models. The .ie resolution procedure is shown on the WIPO page detailing .ie cctld. The domains that went as far as the dispute resolution procedure were shopelectric.ie, ebay.ie and office1.ie. The number of French (.fr) domains that involved in dispute resolution seems small as well with four decisions in 2004 and one case pending in 2005.
The .ie cctld has been rather lucky when it comes to examples of glaring me-too registration attempts. The examples of ebay.ie and qxl.ie were dot.bomb echoes. Both domains had an associated Irish limited company. In the directorship of both companies, there was a connection to Irish auction website ebid.ie which sought to replicate Ebay’s success in Ireland with a comparatively miniscule market and poor technology. The Ebay.ie domain was transferred to Ebay in the last two weeks and now points to Ebay’s site.
A Microsoft related registration msn.ie changed ownership recently but the original site had all the appearance of one of the few remaining Irish dot.bomb ventures, Online.ie though it was clearly evident that it was not owned or operated by Online.ie.
Tags: ICANN , Domains, URDP , IEDR
Written by John McCormac on March 18th, 2005 with
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