Iceland’s legal war against UK grocer
NAME BATTLE: British frozen-food chain uses ‘Iceland’ in its branding
THE island nation of Iceland said on Thursday it is taking legal action against British frozen-food chain Iceland over the right to use their shared name.
Iceland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had challenged Iceland Foods at the European Union Intellectual Property Office.
It says it is acting because the retail chain “aggressively pursued” Icelandic companies using the word Iceland in their branding.
Iceland Foods holds a Europewide trademark registration for the word “Iceland” and the Nordic country’s government said it was “exceptionally broad and ambiguous in definition”.
In a statement, the ministry said the situation had left the country’s firms “unable to describe their
An
hangs outside a shop in products as Icelandic”.
The retailer, which has operated supermarkets across Britain for 46 years, said it would fight the claim.
It said it did not believe “any serious confusion or conflict has ever arisen in the public mind” between the chain of stores and the volcanic Viking-founded nation.
“We hope that the government
Iceland. will contact us directly so that we may address their concerns,” the company said.
The two Icelands once had a close relationship.
Icelandic retail conglomerate Baugur Group held a major stake in the grocer until Baugur’s collapse in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis that devastated Iceland’s economy. AP law of most European nations.
In the Christian religion, there is a kind of hierarchy of images to be respected: God the Father and Jesus are at the top, then comes the Virgin Mary with child.
While the scenes in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Hail Mary (in which the director brings a virgin birth into a modern setting) were quite modest, protesters who set fire to a cinema showing the film in the French city of Tours in 1985 were expressing an attitude of “get your hands off the Holy Mary”. Question: Are fundamentalist groups ever tempted to transform art into an instrument of influence or propaganda? Answer: Many of these movements do so by adopting a form of pious spreading of the Christian message, using representations that do not even purport to be artistic: they are Sulpician images, a little kitsch.
You find them in the United States among Pentecostal movements or in the Mormon faith, whose iconography is dripping with sentimentality.
We have to understand that religious art has a function that is not primarily about wrongdoing, but rather about instruction, emotion and recollection.
As for militants, the very idea of subversive art that society could rejoice in as a manifestation of freedom and creativity is alien to them.
We have to read into their acts of destruction something rather more than just a few extremists protesting against a play in Paris (because of its content). AFP