Schmidt is one of the first French brands of kitchens, but also the first kitchen furniture export company in France. Schmidt group has decided to launch its new website in « .brand » (dot brand), .schmidt and thus has joined many big companies which have made this bet, like BNP Paribas (mabanque.bnpparibas), MAIF (voyagepro.maif), Club Med (corporate.clubmed) or the latest, SNCF (oui.sncf). Schmidt chose to regroup its activity under the « home design » designation which describes well its indu... Read More
Category: News
Bitter taste to confectionary disputes
Last week the UK Court of Appeal ruled on the long running battle between Nestlé and Cadbury (owned by Mondeleze) over the attempt to register the shape of the KitKat bar in the UK. Trademarks need to be a “badge of origin”. In particular registration of a shape mark requires good evidence of acquired distinctiveness to show that consumers rely on shape in a “trade mark sense”. The UK court has ruled that this is not the case for the KitKat shape. The mere fact that cons... Read More
Cyber-blurring: the strategy used by Macron’s digital team to face cyberattacks
May the 5th , 2017, two hours before the end of 2017 presidential campaign, thousands of documents owned by the campaign team of the candidate Emmanuel Macron have been leaked and have been made public on American forum 4Chan, relayed by Wikileaks. Social media have played an important role in the attack and content diffusion: internal discussion of the political party, briefing notes, pictures, bills, accounting, which represent 9 gigaoctets of hacked data. Since the beginning of the pr... Read More
Mastodon : What about cybersquatting ?
Communication on social media is the subject of many justified concerns from trademarks owners. As a matter of fact, user’s names creation, called “username”, are not legally protected beforehand. Specifically, the owner has to register or retrieve the username corresponding to their brand or demonstrate to the social media that the use of their brand is used with ill intent. In short, it’s a time consuming activity… Mastodon, a few months old social network, trendy since a few days, is ... Read More
Good name, bad product
New product development is exciting – and costly. In addition to the essential R&D, market research and marketing initiatives, all products require a name which is (ideally) distinctive and available. Finding the right name in itself is a costly business that involves many steps: name & logo creation, trademark research, brand validation & strategy, trademark filing and protection). Depending on where you plan to launch and therefore protect your product name will define the co... Read More
New extensions: The first signs of a (R)evolution?
Domain names registration strategies follow reasoning sometimes hard to understand. However “sheep-like” reasoning is the one we can easily observe. When Alphabet (Google) used for the first time its domain name ABC.XYZ, a sensitive rise of registrations for this extension has been observed. More than a simple registration, ABC.XYZ has created for the public, informed or not, an interrogation on the extension used: “they aren’t in .COM?” New gTLDs’s program by ICANN has generated ... Read More
Connected objects: unavoidable in DDoS attacks?
Nowadays consumers use and are around connected objects. The Internet of Things (IoT) includes all connected objects like a connected refrigerator, captor, light bulb, security camera, router or even a thermostat control. Their common point? To have an IP address and to be connected to communicate. According to the American company Gartner, connected objects will reach 20.5 billion units by 2020. We will face an impressive growth of IoT in the years to come. China, North America and West... Read More
Let’s talk about DNSSEC
DNSSEC has taken shape, and has become essential in security process recommended by ANSSI as well as the web in general. And yet, it’s a barbaric term that is often scary as we don’t know how it works and what it’s used for. This article will focus on clarifying this term. The Domain Name System Security Extensions is a standardized protocol of communication allowing to resolve security problems related to DNS. We will begin by a reminder of what is the DNS. What is the DNS? S... Read More
What is the appropriate way to deal with inappropriate content on the internet?
The internet is a great place to find content of all sorts. Videos of cats doing crazy stunts, memes, thought provoking lifestyle messages. But this rich availability means ease of access to a wide variety of inappropriate content. Inappropriate content means any material that is disturbing, improper, and just wrong. It can be images of real or simulated violence or of a sexually explicit nature. Recently there have been concerns raised around disturbing YouTube videos. These strongly resemble v... Read More
Towards a 100% encrypted web, the new challenges of HTTPS
Between Mars, 2016 and Mars, 2017, Let’s Encrypt has issued 15 270 SSL certificates containing “PayPal” term, 14 766 of these certificates were issued for domains leading to phishing websites. It’s the result of the recent analysis led by Vincent Lynch, SSL expert. Lynch was closely interested in this case, after an interesting article published by Eric Lawrence (Google Chrome Security Team) in January 2017, the image above is from this article named “Certified Malice “which expos... Read More
