Furious Ferrari Crash Car Enthusiasts Website

He must have spent hours after hours in front of  his computer, (or perhaps MacBook) photoshopping the car of his dreams, the guy at  Milano Torino, a small Italian car tuning service business. An I belive he must have been  quite satisfied with the result; a redesigned Ferrari, named “Ferrari 770 Daytona”.  And, of course, he immediately published his creation online. However the good folks over at the Ferrari headquarters, , was not happy – not at all! It didn’t take the corporate lawyers many minutes to have the manipulated photo banned. In addition they closed down the whole Milano Torino website…

“Ferrari never authorized Milano Torino to design a car named Ferrari 770 Daytona, nor to use its trademarks, Ferrari asked and obtained to take down the website matrix911.wix.com/milantorino.”

Ferrari attorney

It’s understandable that the famous car maker want to protect its valuable brand, and having the photo removed would have been fully acceptable. But pulling the plug on a  whole website? That requires a lot of power, and I’m not talking about horse-power!

This is NOT a real Ferrari

According to chillingeffects.org, the overenthusiastic Ferrari-fan wanted to create a “new” Ferrari design, one that was a mash-up, if you will, of a newer Ferrari model with an older one. Specifically, a Ferrari F12berlinetta and a Ferrari Daytona.

Needless to say this sort of conceptual fusion and the related use (implicit or explicit) of Ferrari trade dress and trademarks, is not the sort of thing Ferrari endorses or even condones.

Milano Torino did not create their new hybrid by physically modifying a real car they owned. No. This fusion happened exclusively in Photoshop, and the resulting picture was published to their website, and of course, immediately elsewhere.

Ferrari took near immediate action, and here’s where it gets interesting:

Not only did Ferrari file a notice asking Milano Torino’s ISP to remove the image in question, which is presumably within Ferrari’s rights, however questionable a decision from a customer relations standpoint, Also, Ferrari somehow arranged to have Milano Torino’s entire site taken down!

That’s right, they made the company’s entire (admittedly terrible) website go away, not just the one car that looked vaguely like an older Ferrari.

The website www.jalopnik.com quotes a short statement from the Ferrari lawyers:

Ferrari never authorized Milano Torino to design a car named Ferrari 770 Daytona, nor to use its trademarks, Ferrari asked and obtained to take down the website matrix911.wix.com/milantorino.

The actions of the Ferrari company may seem legally questionable, but chillingeffects.org have done some research, and this is the explanation:

Wix.com, Milan Torino’s host, is apparently “headquartered in Tel Aviv, with offices in San Francisco, New York City and Dnepropetrovsk”.

And Israeli law on notice and takedown is as follows: “When it comes to ISP safe harbors, Israel has a notice and takedown system that lets copyright owners notify an ISP regarding infringing material on its servers. In such cases, the user hosting the material has three days to respond to the charge;”

Let’s hope this is not a sign  of times to come.

Meanwhile, don’t fuck with Ferrari!

Related articles:

• Ferrari Marks 10 Million Facebook Fans Milestone with Cartoon (gatgetmaster.com)
• Rearview Camera Law to Boost Vehicle Price by $200 (inautonews.com)
• Ferrari’s new powerful hybrid car (greendiary.com)

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