Haynes and Boone's Newsroom

Registering Trade Names and Trademarks on Facebook
10/23/2009
Bart Fisher

Last June the Facebook online networking site announced that users, both individuals with profiles and Facebook page administrators for businesses with a fan page, could register personalized usernames as their universal resource locator (URL), or Facebook website address, beginning June 13, 2009. Users quickly snatched up millions of unique name registrations. In fact, it was reported that within the first fifteen minutes of the open registration “land rush,” over half a million usernames were registered and within the first twelve hours over three million usernames were registered. Since those first few hours of the open registration, many others have registered their names and brands.

The personalized usernames are to be as close as possible to the user’s true name and may look something like “http://www.facebook.com/username”, where the username can be a depiction of the user’s actual name (e.g., JohnDoe, John.Doe) or the company’s name or trademark (e.g., BrandName, Brand.Name). To reduce chances of unauthorized name registration, Facebook allows each user to have only one address and temporarily limited the “land rush” period registration to users who had Facebook accounts before the announcement of the personalized usernames. This prevented people from creating new accounts just to take advantage of reserving a username. In addition, Facebook allowed brand owners to pre-register their trademarks in order to prevent others from squatting on the brand owner’s mark. However, the brand owners were given only a couple of days to pre-register their marks before the open registration. If you missed registering your brand name during the pre-registration or the “land rush,” you may be out of luck if another user has legitimately registered the name you wanted. To reduce username squatting it is not possible to transfer a registered username to a different account. However, Facebook has reserved the right to remove and/or reclaim any registered username at any time for any reason. So, if you believe that another user has infringed your intellectual property rights, you may report it to Facebook using their username infringement form. Facebook will investigate and remove infringing names. The username infringement form requires that you list the name that you feel infringes your rights and that you list your trademark registration number and registration country.

For more information please contact your intellectual property attorney.

Bart Fisher is an associate in the Austin office of the law firm of Haynes and Boone, LLP. His practice emphasizes patent law. He may be reached at bart.fisher@haynesboone.com or 512.867.8458.

You may also view this article in the PDF linked below.