Intellectual Property Law

Act Fast to Protect Your Trademarks on Facebook

By Tim Feathers

Facebook, the social networking website, will begin allowing vanity URL's this weekend, inviting yet another opportunity for opportunistic domainers to nab your trademarks.Specifically, Facebook has announced that beginning on June 13, 2009, at 12:01 a.m. EDT, users of the Facebook website who signed up prior to June 9, 2009, will be able to assign a personalized, vanity URL to their Facebook profiles and pages. Up to now, only celebrities and others of note could assign a personalized URL to their Facebook profiles.

User names must be at least five characters in length and can only include alphanumeric characters (A to Z, 0-9) or periods.User names will be allocated on a first-come, first-serve basis to users who access www.facebook.com/username/.After selection, user names cannot be changed or transferred.

Trademark owners can protect their marks by submitting information to Facebook via an online form entitled "Preventing the Registration of a Username" which is available here. This form requests a registration number, and information is not yet available on whether use of an unregistered common-law mark can be prevented.The form provides entry of only one mark, so owners of several marks will presumably have to submit one form for each mark to be protected.

Time is short and Facebook expects a rush of requests beginning just after midnight on Friday.As with most of these online trademark matters, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and we strongly urge all trademark holders to consider protecting their marks through the procedure outlined above

Full post as published by The TechKnowledgy Blog on June 11, 2009 (boomark / email).