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Patent Office Agrees To Facebook’s “Face” Trademark
- pierrefar 16y agoNaively, I ask: does this affect Apple's Facetime? http://www.apple.com/mac/facetime/ http://www.apple.com/mac/facetime/
- jjcm 16y agoNo. Or rather, not yet. Right now it only has a trademark on face when used in the context of "book". Now if they update their statement of use to include the word "time", or face as it relates to video chat software/media; then (assuming the statement of use was approved by the USPTO) apple would have legal annoyances. I highly doubt that it would hold up in a court case vs apple if it were approved.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ja27 16y agoWasn't the term "face book" in rather common use at many colleges and universities? Isn't that where they got the name? What if they'd called themselves yearbook.com?
- jawee 16y agoIt was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_(directory) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_(directory) I wouldn't be surprised if some colleges still have their own facebooks on their website.
- AgentConundrum 16y agoWait... maybe I've been grossly misinformed, but I thought you couldn't trademark, for lack of a better term, a single normal word. Isn't this why Google is called "Google" and not "Googol"?
- rbanffy 16y agoJust try to market an integrated office suite called "Office", an OS called "Windows" or a computer called "Apple" to see what happens...
- AgentConundrum 16y agoJust try to market an integrated office suite called "Office" Microsoft owns the trademark to something like "Microsoft Office" not the actual word Office, right? Also, doesn't OpenOffice still exist?
- citricsquid 16y agoThey own it when used in defined context: > Telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars. So if you use "Face" ... in any of those areas you're infringing on their trademark, however if you named your cleaning product "facebegone" you'd be fine.
- AgentConundrum 16y agoI didn't realize you could do that. I guess I learned something new today.
- Myrth 16y ago> facebegone The best tools for The Cleaner.
- rbanffy 16y ago> Microsoft owns the trademark to something like "Microsoft Office" not the actual word Office, right? I think the fact there is no Sun (or Oracle, or IBM) Office speaks for itself. Specially in the case of McNeally's Sun, that would find it specially appealing to dilute the value of a Microsoft brand by naming a product as close to theirs as possible. No one did it. People fear, understandably, Microsoft's lawyers.
- sukuriant 16y agoDo I understand this to mean that Facebook is now warring over the two, distinct halves of its name? For the past while, I've seen Facebook fighting over "Lamebook" and now they're pushing for a trademark on "Face". Do they want a controlling interest in all: Face* and *book?
- zabraxias 16y agoI see this as an excellent way to give foreign competitors a boost while making sure you can sue the domestic competition.
- lesterbuck 16y agoWhen a given word becomes too strongly associated with a single company, then the word itself, in all its uses, becomes protectable by that company. The one case I know of is the word "gallo" (Spanish for rooster). The Gallo wine company has such a strong mark that they regularly crush people that try to use the word in any context, such as a small hispanic artist in San Antonio that named his company "Puro Gallo". I'm not saying I agree with this, at all, but that is one aspect of current trademark law. It took the Gallo family decades to establish the strength of their mark. I would guess that the entire idea of "Facebook" will be rather quaint long, long before the idea of "face" can embed itself into general commerce enough to be protectable as a word in all uses.