Facebook Trademark Battle Emerges

Aaron Greenspan, the author of "Authoritas" and owner of Think Computer Corporation, has continued his ongoing dispute against Facebook. Greenspan has continued to fight with Facebook about claims that he has rights to Facebook and was actually one of the initial founders of the site. We've seen these arguments before but rather than taking the route of the Winklevoss brothers who sued Facebook, Greenspan decided to write a book documenting what he considers to be his own creation, not Mark Zuckerberg's. The most recent claim has resulted in a continuation of proceedings over the trademark of "FACEBOOK". It appears that Aaron Greenspan has filed for the trademark to be canceled. While I've been parsing through the legalese for the past hour or so, Greenspan claims that Sean Parker deceived the USPTO when filing the trademark as President of Facebook because he "was afraid of losing a bidding war for the domain name 'facebook.com' and wished to conjure up claims to rights" Facebook, Inc. never had. One of the main reasons for the complaints is that Google (assumed as the "major search engine" referenced in the USPTO document), prevented Greenspan from advertising the book using the keyword "Facebook". As such Greenspan decided to file an amendment to the filing with the USPTO as appeals to Google were unsuccessful. Many of the claims appear to be made directly by Aaron Greenspan as many of the arguments would appear to be less relevant. For instance, the complaint claims that Sean Parker and those representing Facebook, Inc. have "a history of willfully making false statements in public and may intend to use these statements as evidence in these proceedings." So is the USPTO supposed to dismiss all arguments presented by Facebook because they could be false? Yes! Essentially, Aaron Greenspan is claiming "fraud in the procurement of a registration." It appears that the claims will be heard though. As stated in the most recent text, "Thus, petitioner has alleged sufficient facts as to its damage that, if proven at trial, would establish that it has a real interest in this case beyond that of the general public and, consequently, would establish petitionerâ€™s standing to maintain this proceeding." A continuation of the text states "Upon reviewing the amended pleading, the Board finds that petitioner has sufficiently, albeit minimally, pled a claim of fraud in the procurement of the registration." Facebook moved to have the motion made by Aaron Greenspan dismissed but that motion was denied. The board appears to agree with what I wrote; that facts presented by Greenspan are not all relevant to the argument. Regardless, the proceedings against Facebook, Inc. have been resumed in determining ownership of the "FACEBOOK" trademark. It also appears that the proceedings could very well last into December of next year unless the proceedings are ended due to a technicality. The document sounds fairly critical of Greenspan in that they suggest he hire proper representation since he is representing himself in addition to mentioning a lack of completely relevant facts. Looks like Facebook has one more case to pay their lawyers for in addition to the lawsuit playing out with StudiVZ, the German Facebook copycat. It will be interesting to see how these all pan out! The full document for those interested in it is embedded below.

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Facebook Trademark Battle Emerges

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill