Ikea wipes out copycat ‘I love Ikea’
The Swedish furniture giant has won a legal name fight with the website Iloveikea.se that is selling Ikea goods at discount prices.
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Ikea, the world’s largest furniture retailer with some 283 branches in 36 countries, has won a legal battle with a Swedish company selling used Ikea goods on the website Iloveikea.se.
In May Ikea opened a legal proceedings over the rights to the domain name as the company felt the site infringed on the Ikea brand.
“It’s obvious that a visitor to a homepage with the description iloveikea as the impression that it is the applicant (Ikea) which lies behind the website to which the domain name leads,” Ikea’s attorney Jonas Gulliksson wrote at the time, according to the TT news agency.
On Tuesday the Internet Infrastructure Foundation, the body responsible for registering domain names with the ending “.se”, ruled in favor for Ikea. The foundation said that the domain name easily could be mistaken for a site run by Ikea.
The company ILI Global AB, which opened up its business in April and plans to expand outside the Swedish borders as soon as the legal battle is settled, will now change its name – to billyandfriends.se. An quite humorous eyewink to Ikea’s tremendously popular Billy bookshelves.
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Last Updated (Wednesday, 09 September 2009 13:30)









