Legal Research

Trade-mark Owners Can Prevent Their Marks from Being Registered as Usernames on Facebook

By Simon Chester

I’m borrowing (or plagiarizing) this piece from my partner Mark Edward Davis

On Tuesday, June 9, 2009, Facebook, an extremely popular social networking website based in the United States, announced that beginning Saturday, June 13th at 12:01 a.m. EDT, users of the Facebook website will be allowed to create personalized URLs for their Facebook pages in the format (facebook.com/yourname). Currently, a Facebook user?s webpages are identified by an id number. While this change allows users to personalize their URL, it also creates the potential for Facebook users to misappropriate a trade-mark as their username (facebook.com/trade-mark). To prevent the unauthorized use of a trade-mark as a username, Facebook has created an online form for trade-mark owners to register their trade-marks. The form is available online.

To reduce the risk of having a trade-mark registered improperly as a Facebook username, trade-mark owners should act quickly to register their trade-marks.

According to Computerworld, Facebook said usernames must be a minimum of five characters and can only contain letters, numbers or a full stop. In a bid to stop ’squatting’. The social network said that anybody that signed up for a profile after May 31 may not be able to sign up for a username immediately.

Answers to some of the frequently asked questions about the trade-mark registration process can be found online.

Facebook has also established a procedure for reporting that someone?s username infringes an intellectual property right. The Notice of Infringement is available online.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 11, 2009 (boomark / email).