Facebook IP protection is only for companies that join Companies which were promised the chance to protect their trade marks from being used as Facebook addresses have been told they can now only do so by signing up for a Facebook page. When Facebook allowed users to customise web addresses to include their name after the domain name Facebook.com, it said that it was putting …
Sign up, provide only the barest minimum of information required to establish an account, and the only thing you put on your company's FB page is a link to your company website. Then you just leave the page unchanged, so you don't have to waste time editing it - or you just put whatever product you're pushing at the moment on there. And you get to pinch Facebook's traffic...
Unfortunately Facebook don't have an obligation to do anything without a court order; this is why Google don't bother to actively protect trademarks either; they leave it to the IP owner, which can be incredibly difficult (and expensive) to police, but so long as the choclolate factory carries on earning, its all good, right?
Funnily enough, although this sounds like a scam from Facebook, its probably a practical response to a difficult situation; making the IP owner have a page will a. give users a legitimate destination, and b. give IP owners an incentive to check Facebook, and c. give Facebook a "live" contact with the IP owner.
tbh I'm with FaceBook on this one. If you’re not going to have a page and use FaceBook, then why should FaceBook 'protect' your string of characters?
Ok if a person with a 'trademarked' name page has slanderous or damaging statements about said trademark then Facebook should shut it down pronto.
Trademark law like copyright law is being abused by companies who assume their rights trump everyone elses.
waiting for the news story about 'running out of trademarkable words'...
"Unless brands have a clear social networking strategy they will not want to incur the time and cost associated with maintaining a Facebook page."
The whole 5-10 minutes time and cost of:
1 creating a Facebook page
2 putting http://www.companyname.com/ in the status
3 uploading company logo as picture.
Of course, people might send you messages and someone might have to read them...
Although you can easily create a page (remember facebook pages are different from creating a facebook profile whcih is only for individuals) for your business, you can't assign the username to it until you have a 100 fans of the page (to help prevent cybersquatting)! Something I have been struggling with for the last month - as the page is not officially sanctioned by all parts of the busines, I can't ask our staff directly to become fans to overcome the 100 fan minimum!!
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