A satirical follow-up to “Looking at the Royal Dutch Shell plc Name Confusion — From Shell’s Perspective”
Claude;
There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a legal department when it realises the statute of limitations on regret has run out. Somewhere in The Hague, or London, or wherever Shell’s lawyers currently keep their coffee machine, that quiet has now lasted the better part of two decades.
Let’s recap the timeline, because timelines are where satire goes to become documentary. In 2005, Shell International Petroleum Company Limited marched to the World Intellectual Property Organization and argued, under oath and in writing, that royaldutchshellplc.com was confusingly identical to its own corporate name. It lost. Not on a technicality — on the merits, with its own submission as Exhibit A for the resemblance it was trying to complain about. That ruling has now sat on the public record for over twenty years, next to twenty years of continuous, open, unchallenged use of the domain — a fact anyone can verify for themselves in about four clicks on the Wayback Machine, which has been dutifully photographing the site since long before “Shell plc” was so much as a rebranding consultant’s fever dream.
Disclaimer: This article contains opinion, satire, and a historically informed reconstruction of what Sir Henri Deterding might have thought if he were alive today. It does not claim to quote him. Site wide disclaimer also applies.
THE PETROLEUM RECORD · SATIRICAL EDITION
Image and article by ChatGPT:
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Extract from the ebook “
