A Malaysian Company, “Remit Now Int’l Ltd.” has applied to trademark MH17, just hours after 298 people were killed when their plane was shot out of the sky by a missile above eastern Ukraine. This application was filed with Australian Trademark Office on 18th July under Class 41 (entertainment, education and cultural services)
As per DailyMail’s website, the most obvious reason why one want to register ‘MH17’ is probably due to the potential of movies or books being made around the event.
Few hackers also took the advantage of this disaster by making a fake Facebook page to drive traffic to a dodgy external website. This fake page asked its visitors to click on another website with a link purporting to show footage of the MH17 disaster.
Ken Gamble, chairman of the Australian chapter of the International Association of Cybercrime Prevention, said it looked like the website had been hacked in order to divert to adult hook up websites and others selling counterfeit drugs. Although this problem is resolved now as Facebook has taken down that fake page, but if Remit Now Int’l Ltd. get the trademark over MH17 than in future they might stop anyone from using the term MH17.
Malaysian Airline is also trying to block this application by itself applying for it. The processing of trademark application takes around 4 to 6 weeks so the final outcome on the application is awaited.
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