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Facebook Denies Disputed Page To Both Mercks
itwbennett writes "In follow-up to yesterday's story about how Merck in Germany is threatening legal action to take its vanity Facebook URL back from Merck U.S., Facebook apologized for its 'administrative error' in reassigning the URL but said that if the two companies can't play nice, no one will get the URL."
Two companies have just been bitch slapped for getting uppity about a common name in world market. How many other inane intellectual property disputes could have been resolved or prevented by doing this?
I get the joke, but it's actually really easy one. It obviously belongs to the German company that originally registered it on Facebook. Why does US companies think they can thump on everyone else?
It just goes to show what an agreement with Facebook is worth.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Makes one wonder what a Facebook account is really worth to a company (or pop group, or artist, whatever). On the one hand, the option of gaining & holding customers, and do lots of PR through the social network, on the other hand the possibility that at any time, if someone with same name (competitor?) creates a dispute about it, Facebook might close the account for no good reason.
Who needs hackers for a DoS attack when Facebook could do the job for you?
At this point, it does not obviously belong to the German company because we do not know how control ended up in the hands of the U.S. company. It is possible that someone with the German company who had been designated to Facebook as the "administrator" did so. Obviously, it is more likely that someone at Facebook turned administrative control over to the U.S. company (probably because they did not realize there were two pharmaceutical companies with the same name and assumed that the representative of the U.S. company was the representative of the company that originally registered the name--it is even possible that the representative of the U.S. company did not realize that they were taking control from the German company when they did this).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No, it obviously belongs to Facebook (or at least as much as facebook.com belongs to Facebook, except that isn't quite as clear). Whatever Facebook decides to do with it, is defined as the right answer.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
So you're suggesting a Disambiguation page?
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Yes, but you can put up a billboard and refuse to let Disney by space on it. Facebook isn't using the trademark improperly, merely refusing to let either side use it. This makes perfect sense for Facebook. Whichever one it would have sided with, the other would have sued them. If it lets neither use the name, there's nothing they can do.
There's no winning answer here.
Sure there is: the winning answer is to not use Facebook.
Except that Facebook is still private property. They don't have to let you promote your trademark on their site any more than a company could force you to paint their logo on the side of your house.
Denying both companies access to the name on Facebook is a completely viable and legal means to not infringe on any trademark.
You may also want to brush up on trademarks a bit. It is possible to have the same trademark for different industries, and one does not trump the other. Say for example, I have a registered trademark for Apple toothbrushes. I am free to promote my trademark, even if Apple computers doesn't like it. Granted it does get even murkier when industries are similar across international boundaries, but one trumping the other is still a tough argument to make.
In the end it is very funny that Facebook basically give a timeout to two companies acting like two year old children.
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