Patent Office Agrees To Facebook’s “Face” Trademark

Naively, I ask: does this affect Apple's Facetime? http://www.apple.com/mac/facetime/

Wasn't the term "face book" in rather common use at many colleges and universities? Isn't that where they got the name? What if they'd called themselves yearbook.com?

When a given word becomes too strongly associated with a single company, then the word itself, in all its uses, becomes protectable by that company. The one case I know of is the word "gallo" (Spanish for rooster). The Gallo wine company has such a strong mark that they regularly crush people that try to use the word in any context, such as a small hispanic artist in San Antonio that named his company "Puro Gallo". I'm not saying I agree with this, at all, but that is one aspect of current trademark law. It took the Gallo family decades to establish the strength of their mark. I would guess that the entire idea of "Facebook" will be rather quaint long, long before the idea of "face" can embed itself into general commerce enough to be protectable as a word in all uses.

Do I understand this to mean that Facebook is now warring over the two, distinct halves of its name?

For the past while, I've seen Facebook fighting over "Lamebook" and now they're pushing for a trademark on "Face". Do they want a controlling interest in all:

Face* and *book?

Wait... maybe I've been grossly misinformed, but I thought you couldn't trademark, for lack of a better term, a single normal word.

Isn't this why Google is called "Google" and not "Googol"?

I see this as an excellent way to give foreign competitors a boost while making sure you can sue the domestic competition.