expropriate
Skank works betterer.
An EU court has tried to forestall ongoing US legal proceedings by declaring that an expat Frenchman can’t trademark a logo containing the domain name France.com. The EU General Court, a division of the EU Court of Justice, ruled today that Jean-Noel Frydman’s company France.com Inc was not entitled to register the domain name …
Nor a tourism agency "with an army and navy."
Soem American bought (from memory) anglican.com or anglican.org way back in the 1990s. The Church of England had to work with him (through gritted teeth), as he would not give it up. He wasn't earned big bucks off the church, but he was clearly enjoying yanking their chain. Yes, they should have had the wisdom to grab the word, but this was the 1990s.
The practical effect of today’s judgment appears to be the destruction of Frydman’s intellectual property
That part is not. You cannot trade mark the name of a country, its flag or other state symbols or a trivial modification of them. This is part of pretty much all copyright legislation since the dawn of copyright law.
That cuts both ways - the state has absolutely no inherent right to the domain either.
A common misconception for people with no trademark knowledge whatsoever: what matters is not the differences, but similarities. So when your name wholly contains an existing trademark, of course it violates it.
Eg, you can't trademark google.safdsjnjknbrtfdglkmyu. Even if you continue randomly typing for a looooong time, to have a loooooot of difference, it won't matter one bit.
France dot com Inc. has a better right to any dot com address than any government. That's what the dot com TLD is supposed to be for.
If France wants a tourism site they can have france.fr or tourism.fr or whatever they want under their own country code, since they ultimately own the whole namespace.
This is pure theft by a bunch of corrupt politicians and judges for no better reason trying to rig the google ranking game for their own tedious little state tourism department website.
The article forgets that the guy brought the attention of the state not when he got more hits on his website, but when he sued another company which was also trying to trademark the same name to get control of the name.
And "a Paris court’s judgment that (quelle surprise) ruled in their favour". Seriously? You mean that the French judiciary is at the boot and heel of the French executive? And that they never, ever, rule in favour of foreign companies? I'm fine with a good joke, but come on, far too many readers take that in the first degree.