According to a story on out-law.com a company named Virtual Dates Inc. registered the domain name AirFranceSucks.com (which actually redirects to an Epinions.com web site).
Virtual Dates contends that the domain was “a freedom of expression site for the registration of complaints or recommendations about the airline.” Au contraire, Air France disagreed claiming that Virtual Dates was just trying to cash-in on the airline’s trade mark — Air France sees the site as a commercial entity and not a gripe site (actually, if you check out the postings you’ll find that the airline seems reasonably well liked although its hub, Charles de Gaulle airport in France, is apparently almost universally loathed).
In February 2005 that Air France put their a claim to the World Intellectual Property Organisation alleging cybersquatting. WIPO moved with astounding speed and made their decision on May 24th!
The decision? Air France gets to own the domain, AirFranceSucks.com.
What’s interesting about this case is it highlights the whole problem of domains that are disputed on the basis of potential trademark infringement.
Previous judgements of whether a trademark word or phrase plus the word “sucks” constituted trademark infringement were less than consistent. In the case of AirFranceSucks.com the WIPO board were split 2 to 1 in favor of it being a case of infringement. The two panelists voting for it being infringement considered that: The incorporation of a well known trade mark in its entirety as the first and dominant part of a domain name is confusingly similar to this trade mark regardless of whether the additional elements are pejorative as in this case or of a more neutral kind such as airfrancetickets.
The third panelist disagreed concluding that: … it is likely that a substantial percentage of potential customers of Air France are familiar with the English language and, thus, would be aware of the pejorative nature of ‘sucks.’ This then makes the domain name non-infringing and the claim of cybersquatting is invalidated.
According to an article in The Register the domain name “was not confusingly similar to Air France
