Protecting yourself and your company from trademark infringement on Facebook

Facebook is allowing personalized URLs to be added to accounts. On Tuesday, June 9, Facebook, Inc., a social networking website company based in the United States, publicly announced that beginning Saturday, June 13th at 12:01 a.m. U.S. EDT, users of the Facebook website will be allowed for the first time to create personalized URLs for their Facebook pages (facebook.com/yourname).  If you do not secure your name or your company name for your facebook page, someone else might do so causing confusion, trademark infringement and raising the possibility of fraud.

Facebook, Inc. has created an online form for rights owners interested in preventing their trademarks from being registered as usernames by Facebook users.

Trademark owners can reserve their trademark on the Facebook platform by submitting relevant information to Facebook, Inc. through their trademark protection contact form, available at Facebook's trademark rights page.  If you have further questions or concerns, please contact Facebook directly or see its Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.

For more information about the growing threat to personal names, trademarks and brands on facebook and twitter read "The Growing Threat to Trademarks and Personal Names: Social Network Cybersquatting."

Announcement from Facebook: From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn't reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like "id=592952074." That soon will change.

We're planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names. Your username will have the same privacy setting as your profile name in Search, and you can always edit your search privacy settings.

Comments

[Rashid Mahmood]

With an increase in click-fraud by both publishers and competing advertisers I would hope that companies like Facebook would take the high-road and attempt to create technologies to detect and prevent fraud rather than language in their contract to simply protect themselves.
For a company like Google this is more relevant than any and I do hope they don’t follow in Facebook’s footsteps here.

[LisaL]

Enrico,

Thank you for the this interesting news. I am an avid face book user and will be sure to do this on Friday. Have a great day!

Lisa