Please Don’t Panic Just Because Facebook Trademarked the Word ” Face” [Facebook]

Facebook’s been looking to register the word ” face” as a hallmark for ages , but now the U.S. Patent Office has finally decided to grant the social network’s application. Listed below are the main points of what happened.

A little while ago , Facebook took over the trademark application for ” Face” from an organization who operated a domain called Faceparty.com. This particular application was opposed by Aaron Greenspan-the guy who took Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to court over the creation of Facebook-but now has been granted a Notice of Allowance by the USPTO anyway.

The Notice of Allowance implies that provided that Facebook pays a difficulty fee to the USPTO inside the next three months, it may enjoy an indicator on the word ” face” in relation to ” [t]elecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users inside the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject material, none primarily featuring or concerning motoring or to cars”

This basically implies that it might be very unwise that you can name your hot new social networking site something along the lines of FaceMeet, SlapToTheFace, or FaceNovel. You don’t have too much to fear on the subject of naming product or service outside of what the trademark covers though.

It’s also worth noting that it isn’t particularly unusual for an organization to hold trademarks on common words like this. Hell, Apple has ” Chicago” trademarked -when talking about computer fonts. [ TechCrunch ]

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This post is tagged: electronic bulletin boards, mark zuckerberg, social networking site, subject material, trademark application, u s patent office