Air France has won the rights to the domain name AirFranceSucks.com from a Florida company that held it since 1999. Earlier this year the airline brought the case before the World Intellectual Property Organization, which ruled that adding ” ‘sucks’ to a trademark will generally be confusingly similar to that trademark.”
The company that owned the domain, Virtual Dates, argued the issue was a matter of free speech. Typing in the URL brought users to Epinions.com, where people debated just how much Air France sucked.
WIPO also noted that non-English speakers may not be aware of what “sucks” means and could confuse that domain with AirFrance.com.
Via The Register
