Kavinesh Moghan
Creativity abounds when it comes to sharing ideas on repurposing Ikea furnitures on Ikeahackers.net since 2006. This has simply created legion of fans, who has been sharing mods and hacks that shows the countless furniture combinations possible when designing their homes.
The website, which was started by a Kuala Lumpur based Ikea fan who goes by the alias Jules Yap (a pseudonym inspired by Ikea’s Jules chair), began posting attractive examples of repurposed Ikea’s furnitures through IKEAhackers.net. Soon it blossomed into a roaring community of fans, to a point, where Yap had started selling small advertisements to support what had turned out to be a vast job maintaining site.
Cease and Desist
According to Yap in her blog posting, she received a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter from the agent of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., citing that IKEAhackers.net has infringed upon its intellectual property rights and agree to voluntarily transfer the domain name IKEAhackers.net to them, failing which they reserve the right to take any legal action that deems necessary.
However, after some negotiation between their agent and her lawyer, she was allowed to keep the domain name IKEAhackers.net only on the condition that it is non-commercial, meaning no advertising whatsoever, she wrote.
“I agreed to the demand. Because the name IKEAhackers is dearly to me and I am too reluctant to give it up. I love this site’s community and our achievements so far. Secondly, I don’t have deep enough pockets to fight a mammoth company in court,” she wrote in her blog.
“Needless to say, I am devastated. I don’t have any issues regarding them protecting their trademark but I think they could have done it in a proper manner. I am a human, not a corporation. A blogger who is obviously playing for their team. Could they have not talked to me as an ordinary person rather than issuing a C&D? ,” she added.
Yap said the advertisements will be removed by June 23rd and spoke of her intention of wanting to move the site to a different URL.
Representatives from Ikea Malaysia did not respond to multiple requests for comments at press time.
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