Facebook Stole Our Name and Livelihood | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Stole Our Name and Livelihood

meta.company

33 pointsColinWright14 comments

Open articleView on HN

Big discussion 5 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29074406

(384 points/189 comments)

Cool ... thanks for the find .. I did look, just possibly not hard enough.

Upvoted (and thumbs up)

This was already submitted this week.

FWIW my take is that they are basically patent troll at this point. Hate Facebook all you want but they have several products and the real domain name, the author(s) of the article don't.

What does Meta actually do? They seem to have removed everything from their social media and websites the except for the press release, and it's extremely difficult to Google around for something like "meta company" even if you ignore facebook-related results. Trademark infringement requires operating in a similar market, and while Facebook has plenty of marks they don't have all of them. It looks like they really just wanted the websites and namespace, and it truly boggles my mind that they didn't try to register the website first.

Meta is very effectively controlling this narrative, and they're definitely in the right to raise an issue about the harassment and bullying and generally getting legally steam rolled, making an actual trademark infringement cast will be a separate story

You say:

> ... it truly boggles my mind that they didn't try to register the website first.

Assuming you mean FB, they clearly were trying to get the website/domain. From the article:

> At least two law firms were involved: One in the USA that requested our trademark and domains (Kilpatrick, Townsend & Stockton), and the other in Europe aggressively contacting trying to get us to sell our domain registrations (Hogan Lovells).

The point is that FB, despite not getting the domain, then went ahead and made all the announcements anyway. I guess they picked the name, started buying all the associated domains, etc., and in parallel started the marketing. Now they (FB) have found someone (Meta Company) who won't sell the domain (at the price offered) and have decided that they (FB) have invested sufficient time and energy into the exercise that they need to press ahead with this name regardless.

Why bother with .com? Can't they make .meta by now even if it doesn't previously exist? Or at worst meta.meta, or me.ta, there is really no "the domain" any more.

(yes obviously this is a bit disingenuous question. of course any big company has to at least somewhat care about securing their .com still, but really the importance is less than it was, and getting less so not more so. The biggest reason today for something like fb is not even to use it but to prevent anyone else from using it.)

That's the reason I don't invest in Facebook/Meta. It appears to be an immoral company at the core.

It's not like there can be more than one company with the same name...

Trademarks are of course another matter.

When you submit this does it not automatically go to the already submitted entry?

It depends ... I submitted a link into the Way Back Machine because there is a danger that the page content will change. As such the duplication would not be recognised. Sometimes the dup-detection works, sometimes it doesn't. I used to run a robot that would automatically find and cross-connect duplications, but people objected to it and I discontinued using it.

But dup-detection has some difficult corner cases due to all sorts of messing about with URLs and parameters, so it's not at all reliable.

it's the exact same link and title. De-dupe does work, it's probably just a 'after x days allow' thing. Shrug.

> it's the exact same link and title.

It is now, the mods changed it. It wasn't when I submitted it ... as I said, I submitted the link to the site on the Way Back Machine.

ah sorry, thought you were just giving an example. That explains it completely then. Fairplay.

Now this would be a really great time for EFF to step in…

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