Cybersquatting & Domain Dispute Lawyer Attorney Law Firm - Cybersquatting the Social Networks: A New Trademark Risk

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2009.04.23

Comments

Facebook recently declined to give us back our US trademarked user name that we use internationally and copyrighted in the U.S and other countries from a regular user on the basis of first come first serve, so in that sense Facebook allows Copyright and Trademark Infringement on it's domain and does nothing to prevent it so it is Responsible at 100% for the Infringement given it's importance and influence, users basically do whatever they want it is why Facebook is the one that manages the content of the site, Facebook would act swiftly if let's say Porn material is posted on it's site, but the fact it refuses to protect other companies' trademarks and rights on it's domain make them the number one responsible, if Facebook comes to encounter it's name being used under let's say Flickr.com/facebook by a user on the Flickr domain than it is in Flickr best interests to remove that username and give it back to Facebook, but Facebook fails to do the same on it's domain sounds like pure hypocrisy and would be absolute logic to seek legal action against Facebook not the user squatting the name or just using it without knowing it is someone's trademark, Your article makes it sound as a simple process where we encountered careless representatives answering our emails by copying and pasting statements established in a how to book probably by their legal team which fails completely to address case by case scenarios, it is extremely worrying to see a website with such a big number of users act so irresponsibly toward business requests such as this.

Our internet law attorneys are seeing a dramatic increase in trademark infringement on Facebook and Twitter. Social media continues to become a more important tools for business marketing. Protecting your trademark name on those platforms is critical to your overall internet IP protection strategy. While various internet laws protect you here, it is always best to protect yourself and avoid having to hire an attorney if possible.

I think that a court would find that Facebook canvas URLs would be subject to cybersquatting laws, even though they have held that subdirectories do not indicate a source-identifying function in the past. I think the nature of Facebook and the value of the canvas URLs shows that they do indicate source. It will be interesting to see what happens as Facebook apps become more established and cases develop.

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