Meta given 30 days to cease using the name Threads by company that trademarked it 11 years ago

Five@slrpnk.net to Technology@beehaw.org – 190 points –
Meta given 30 days to cease using the name Threads by company that trademarked it 11 years ago
techspot.com
19

How well do you think this is going to go over with their lawyers? I remember what happened to that other company called Meta...

What happened?

From Wikipedia:

"Meta" had been registered as a trademark in the United States in 2018 (after an initial filing in 2015) for marketing, advertising, and computer services, by a Canadian company that provided big data analysis of scientific literature. This company was acquired in 2017 by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a foundation established by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, and became one of their projects. Following the rebranding announcement, CZI announced that it had already decided to deprioritize the earlier Meta project, that it would be transferring its rights to the name to Meta Platforms, and that the project would end in 2022.

So, they bought it through their (non-profit?) foundation and killed it to harvest the name?

That sounds like a great outcome for the original company

I mean, they're obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook...

These lawyers at Meta suck, or management sucks at Meta. Meta sucks?

I think that's neither. The whole thing boils down for me to an adult trying to strike a deal with a kid so the kid gives up their ice cream, the kid saying "no!", and then the adult still grabbing the ice cream by force.

In other words I think that Meta run some risk assessment on the move, and decided that it was still profitable.

3 more...

Considering that Threads was not trademarked by Meta before their launch (or, at least, isn't listed on their Trademarks page ) it is a massive fail on their legal department.

3 more...

As long as the other company was actually USING the trademark, Meta will probably have to pay up. If the company was doing "Trademark-squatting", with no real market use, Meta will probably get control of it. That's all assuming they don't settle for a few hundred thousand.