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."

Comments

Difficult problem

[GameboyRMH]

This is a Mercky issue to wade through...

Re:Difficult problem

[CmdrPony]

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?

Re:Difficult problem

[NotSanguine]

It just goes to show what an agreement with Facebook is worth.

Re:Difficult problem

[Attila Dimedici]

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).

Re:Difficult problem

[Cajun Hell]

It obviously belongs to the German company that originally registered it on Facebook

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.

Re:Difficult problem

[Canazza]

So you're suggesting a Disambiguation page?

This is awesome

[onyxruby]

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?

Re:Trademarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, if they didn't want their trademarks appropriated they shouldn't have gone to war with us 93 years ago.

Re:you go FB!

[DriedClexler]

Solomon's solution would be give one of them the "Mer", and the other one "ck", and then instantly void the deal and give it to whoever doesn't want to see the name split.

Re:Trademarks?

[Cajun Hell]

Fantastic, so now Facebook has the right of determining valid trademarks, on top of all the personal data it collects

It's is Facebook's namespace (and you can have on too, right now, if you want). They get to decide whether or not trademarks are even relevant within this namespace, let alone top priority at the expense of all other concerns. Why would it be anyone else's decision?

Just because some random arbitrary private namespace out there happens to get popular, doesn't mean the rest of society needs to "officially" recognize it, legitimize it, adopt it, regulate it, or take it seriously. It's just a pathname component in someone's website, and it's their site, just like a hypothetical "Apple" directory on my computer which contains a file called "Disney" is my file in my directory on my computer, and no one else deserves .0000001% say in the matter.

When today's fools finally learn this, then they won't be afraid of new TLDs, BTW.

Re:Trademarks?

[Stormy Dragon]

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.

Re:Trademarks?

[Sez Zero]

There's no winning answer here.

Sure there is: the winning answer is to not use Facebook.