I've actually talked to people about facetime and they've assumed I was talking about some video feature on facebook. People do get confused by it. Facebook is so big anything that starts with Face is just assumed to be related to facebook by some people.
It's product confusion that matters. Facebook doesn't have video, so it shouldn't matter. Facebook doesn't really have email, so i'm not sure how they claim it is confusing. No one says, "go sign up for email on facemail, oh i mean facebook."
In this case there is Facebook (huge, very well known) and someone else (not so huge, not so well known) so it seems obvious to me that there's a chance for confusion.
People are quoting the 36%, but do we know what the other two 3rds said?
Except there are news articles about Facebook's email, as referenced in the report.
Incorrect on two counts. It's the international classification code overlap that matters, and likelihood of confusion, not product confusion. There could be no actual confusion here because the FACEMAIL trademark was filed on an intent-to-use basis.
Apple has legal resources equivalent to Facebook's. There's no reason to believe that the outcome would be the same.
This is a sad state of affairs, and it's even more worrying that this can be applied universally. Enron's disgraced CEO Jeffrey Skilling is receiving an early release from jail due to his promise not to appeal his conviction anymore -- effectively buying his way out of jail.
Wow... he badgered the courts into letting him go? When Jim Bell tried that, they just slapped him with "harassment and stalking of federal agents" and stuck him back in jail.
I wonder how Apple got around the problems with their name being the same as the record label. I somewhere heard that they got the permission to use it if they promise not to enter the music business. ... which they did with the iPod.
The "face" part of FaceTime seems quite directly descriptive of what FaceTime does to me. I know that descriptive names cannot be trademarked. Perhaps that has some bearing on this?