If they have a registered, accepted trademark (and it appears they do), they can reasonably argue that Facebook has damaged their ability to establish the brand's identity despite significant outlay for design, marketing, and advertising -- those are dollars already spent. "Livelihood" includes income, sure, but it can also be read to include lasting damage done to their brand by Facebook prematurely usurping their ability to control the mark.
That is true - unless their livelihood (they mentioned how low the offers were repeatedly) was just to squat the company name and extort FB or whoever else wanted it - especially if they got advanced knowledge of the renaming and registered it after they learned facebook would want it. It's like domain squatting all over again.
"Squatting" a trademark generally isn't possible; if you can't prove use of the mark, the USPTO will simply cancel your registration. I imagine their activity related to the mark would be covered in any potential court proceedings and would be Facebook's primary defense.
Yea - but having a github repository with active development and a meta-logo dating back to early 2021 would probably be pretty compelling to prove active use. This is definitely going to be a headache for somebody but I can't imagine the story as this letter tells it (FB reaching out repeatedly to acquire the name and then going ahead regardless) is a perfect telling of events. Either FB was totally unaware of this company's existence before today or else their lawyers looked over the company and didn't think it was a threat to their usage.
Trade mark legislation, and passing off legislation, protect marks being used. They don't (in general) protect one's "ability to establish [a] brand's identity". That's the right way to do things IMO, brand camping wouldn't help society.
Prima facie it sucks but they can probably get global coverage for their product/services they're already selling (trademark registration requires current use, someone said the OP company have a trademark registered) on the basis of "what do we do now Facebook are using our name".
It seems likely that if they can't leverage this for financial benefit, in a forthright way, then they were going to fail anyway.
What if you work for months/years on a product, waiting for it to be ready-ish before announcing it to the public, only for a corporation to steal your name a few weeks before launch?
You don't just "get a different name". You may already have a logo you paid well for. You may have prepared advertising. You may have references to the name everywhere in your code. And so on. Also even if it was easy and costless to get a new name, it still isn't fair that the big guy can come and simply take it from you without consequence.
Not just that. In the worst case, they may have a container full of their devices ready to go with "Meta" branding on everything. That's a significant cost to recall and redo.
> it's still a bad name because it's a super common word.
I said the same thing about matrix.org back in ~2015 when I first heard of the project. Fast forward to now, though, and "Matrix Room" links are ubiquitous among open source projects....
No they don't. You have to prove significance in a particular market to get trademark protections; you don't get trademark protection over the word as used in all contexts (and since they have no marketshare, because it hasn't launched, there's no conflict at all).
