The world of trademarks and intellectual property sometimes leads to surreal situations, such as the recent case of a company called META that has sued Meta (formerly Facebook) for using their brand without their permission, a situation that in the context at hand could be interpreted at first as involuntary plagiarism, but we will see what is shown or what settlement is reached in the upcoming legal process, especially seeing the trend from Mark Zuckerberg’s company to get into very murky puddles.
META, with capital letters and with the official name of METAx LLC, is a company that, according to its founder, Justin Bolognino, has more than 12 years of history and is dedicated to creating “multi-sensory live experiences that ignite the human spirit with technology, design, music and storytelling”. In addition, Bolognino also argues that the alleged appropriation of the brand by what was Facebook has caused great damage to his business.
We recall that Facebook decided to rename its parent company to Meta as an attempt to clean up its image and boost its Metaverse, leaving the original brand to the social network that kick-started an empire that also has popular services like Instagram and WhatsApp in its hands.
Apparently the lawsuit is not a hot action by Justin Bolognino, since his lawyer, Dyan Finguerra-DuCharme, has explained that his client’s company has been negotiating with Meta for eight months to reach some kind of agreement, obviously without success. The plaintiff has argued that it has been exchanging thousands of pages of information with Zuckerberg’s corporation to reach an agreed solution, but has seen that Meta has no intention of resolving the matter directly.
Although the situation may sound like a joke or a joke, it is not at all unlikely to think that Justin Bolognino’s company is now taken over by something that it is not (provided that his version is true), which is logical if we take into account that Meta, what used to be Facebook has an infinitely greater media impact. This has been highlighted by Dyan Finguerra-DuCharme, who has said that his client, When does it come out “trying to market and promote their services, consumers now falsely and mistakenly believe their services come from Facebook”.
There are things in the lawsuit that have remained, at least for now, up in the air, such as the amount requested for damages. On the other hand, Jessica Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, sees it likely that META (Justin Bolognino’s company) will win in the legal case it has initiated against Meta, but who doubts that the corporation refounded by Mark Zuckerberg does not count with an army of top-tier attorneys at your disposal.
The case at hand is somewhat reminiscent of iFone, a Mexican technology solutions company that was sued by Apple for allegedly violating the iPhone trademark. The dispute was resolved a long time ago in favor of the Mexican company, whose brand is perfectly distinguishable from the smartphone division of the Cupertino giant. However, the situation with META can clearly confuse ordinary people, so the outcome of this legal dispute could be very different.
port imageada: Wikipedia
