Facebook moves to register brands
Social networking site Facebook is launching a scheme on Saturday enabling brand owners to register named URLs to protect their trademarks.
The URLs will take the form www.facebook.com/brandname and will be granted on a first-come-first-served basis, the site's owners say. Any of the site's 200m users will be able to register a Facebook URLs for their name.
Registration will begin at midday East Coast US where Facebook is based; that is 4.00am Saturday morning in the UK.
Once a Facebook user adopts a named URL it will not be transferable to another Facebook account, so as to prevent individuals from registering brand names and then auctioning them. Nevertheless, the scheme is expected to cause a scramble to register among companies keen to protect their brands and individuals looking to secure their personal names.
Facebook's owners say the change is so that individuals can be found more easily by contacts and search engines. But the scheme is being interpreted as a pre-emptive move by Facebook to avoid trademark disputes.
Tony La Russa, coach of baseball team the St Louis Cardinals has recently launched a suit against micro-blogging site Twitter for allowing an account to be set up by an impersonator. Whether he will be successful in suing an intermediary as opposed to the perpetrator remains in debate.
