Facebook asserts trademark on word 'Book' in new user agreement

wired.com

9 points·bootload··5 comments

One more reason not to have a Facebook account, especially if you register a business...

Would it really be in their best interest to shut down the marketing efforts (and Facebook pages) of every company with the word Book in its title? If that ever happened, this would get challenged and antitrust laws would rule against FB's terms of use.

Social is a proven channel and there's a lot to lose when you keep your business off of their platform.

Well, if you look at what they're doing in the courts they're not trying anything so broad (if for no other reason than that they'd fail; do you claim they'd get any traction against Books-A-Million) and all their reported efforts looked OK to me (the parody site is a wobbler, but it sounds like it was settled amicably enough).

Focus on the "confusingly similar"; if you're for example doing sometime social and name yourself <one or two syllable whatever>book, aren't you trying to gain something by being very similar to their mark?

Yeah - I agree with you. I was responding to the commenter's post - re: staying away from Facebook altogether, especially if you're a business. That logic makes no sense.

Reading your reply more carefully I see that, you're enumerating many ways being that extreme would be stupid. Sorry for the misapprehension.

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