Timelines.com Sues Facebook Over ‘Timelines’ Trademark
Facebook announced the ‘Timeline’ feature about a week ago at its f8 developer conference. Timelines.com has now hit Facebook with a suit over a trademark dispute. Facebook’s timeline is a new feature that shows Facebook user profiles as some kind of virtual layout of your history on the site. It is currently being rolled out by the social networking giant. If you don’t have it yet, read How To Get Facebook’s Timeline Now In 7 Steps.
Timelines.com however, is a website that lets its users view, create and edit multimedia timelines for different periods in human history. Like the Assasination of Malcolm X or The Boston Tea Party. Timelines.com has been doing this for about 5 years in collaboration with various media organisations. Timelines owns the trademark for “Timelines,” “Timelines.com” and “Timelines&design” in the US.
Timeline.com says that Facebook has infringed on its trademarks and Facebook destroyed its Facebook page and redirected http://facebook.com/timelines to an introduction about the new Timeline feature. Here’s an excerpt of the suit, filed in the US State of Chicago:
“Facebook’s use of the term “Timeline,” and its redirection of Internet traffic from Timelines’ Facebook page to Facebook’s new “Timeline” offering, infringes on Timelines’ federally registered trademarks in that it causes confusion as to the source of the services offered to users of the Internet. Indeed, Facebook’s “Timeline” offering and its misdirection of users attempting to access Timelines’ offering is intended to prevent Internet users from accessing information about Timelines.com and to allow users to instead use Facebook’s “Timeline” offering.”
This isn’t the first time Facebook is facing lawsuits, the most popular one being the lawsuits with the Winklevoss Twins. ‘Timeline’ is also Twitter lingo for the page where a user’s tweets are shown. If you were Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook at this moment, what would you do?
Source: Mashable
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