Mark Zuckerburg and his team of lawyers have initiated the required legal actions to trademark the words “face” and “book” in URL titles.  If they are successful at getting the trademark ownership for these two terms, a large deal of Internet sites will be in danger of getting their domains seized and fined for the use of the trademarks.  The process is certainly one that is tangled and difficult to get across but it may just be possible for the multi-million dollar company to pull off the deal.

The main problem with the trademarks is the fact that if they do go through, several companies would have to change their URLs to a suitable alternative or risk legal proceedings towards getting fined for unauthorised use of the company trademarks.  A great deal of opposition is already being met by several groups, even one of the claimants to the creation of Facebook, Aaron Greenspan, who has a service that uses the prefix “face” in the domain.  The process will prove to be difficult for Facebook to get the trademark but it may so happen that both of the words will one day be trademarked by one company or another.

I understand that Facebook wants to create a trademark in the name “Facebook” but trying to do that by using “Face” and “Book” as  two different words in which they want to trademark is just silly. There are so many companies that are using the name Face and Book in their company names or in their products. Apple’s FaceTime comes to mind.

Trade marking their name is something that Facebook should try to do, but the thought of them trade marking the word face and book is ridiculous. The prior use of the words online should set a precedent and the trademark office should see right through this attempt.

If Facebook was the first company ever to use those two terms in a URL then I can see them having prior use, but I am sure there are such great websites as face.com and book.com and any other combination of the two.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this, I have seen the patent and trademark offices do some pretty silly things in the past that don’t make much sense to most people in the public, hopefully they make the right choice for this request.

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