Facebook owner is behind $60M deal for Meta name rights | Hacker News Reader

Facebook owner is behind $60M deal for Meta name rights

reuters.com

39 points1cvmask29 comments

Tangentially, it seems as good of a time as any to wonder what ever happened with that other Meta company that popped up on HN a while back[1]. Their website said to expect an announcement "in the coming weeks" (it's been 42 days).

Particularly amusing is that the founder showed up in the comments after most of the discussion was over, said he welcomed questions, and then refused to answer questions about what his company even does.

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

I have seen multiple comments debunking it as a domain squatter.

It’s a good time to remind folks that owning a domain doesn’t give you automatic trademark rights over the name. However owning the name prior to the trademark being registered does appear to give you some protection.

I know this because I settled with Politico.

Meta Financial Group, Inc. hit the jackpot with not only the Meta naming rights but they also have the stock market ticker symbol CASH. That must be worth some you know what.

Do the exchanges allow for the sale or transfer of a ticker symbol?

I'm very surprised "CASH" was not already taken. Perhaps your suggestion is correct and they had bought it from someone else.

>Do the exchanges allow for the sale or transfer of a ticker symbol?

Oh, I really hope so. Tableau had "DATA" before they were bought by Salesforce

I kinda hate it that any company can just decide start using these commonly used words as their brandnames. Like Meta, or Alphabet. Wtf man.

Now everytime somebody says "That's so Meta" or talks about meta they are going to be reminded of this company probably.

Or is it because Metamphetamines begin with Meta ? Is it like digital crack ? They already have Instagram, for that instant gram of social media gratification.

I mean in that case at least it's methamphetamines not metamphetamines.

What's really dumb is that it's become strangely trivial for a trademark to be preserved. Everyone says "just use a Kleenex" but somehow saying "use Kleenex brand facial tissue" is what lawyers pretend everyone says.

It is hard to preserve a trademark You have to differently fight it. Your post a good example. The first one is killing the Kleenex trademark that is why the lawyers say to use the other statement. We have a ton of words that used to be trademarked. Elevator, escalator, zipper to name a few.

there's no such thing as "metamphetamines". Presumably the word you're looking for is "methamphetamine", which doesn't begin with "meta". Although I suppose both "methamphetamine" and "meta" do begin with "met", but then, so do "metropolitan" and "meteorological", amongst a few others.

Also, FWIW: methamphetamine isn't crack. Crack is a form of cocaine. Methamphetamine is what's commonly referred to as "speed".

Since we're being pedantic, meth is not speed. Speed is a street name for amphetamines which aren't quite the same thing.

Since we're being annoyingly pedantic, I would like to correct you and say "Metamfetamine" is a valid and used synonym for "Metamphetamine." https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Methamphetamine

> methamphetamine isn't crack.

Other parts of the world started calling whatever drug was wreaking havoc in their country crack in the mid-2000s, likely as a result from hearing about "crack" from US pop culture.

As such, meth is now called crack in Australia and New Zealand. Crack cocaine doesn't exist there.

Our modern conception of IP, trademarks, and the like, only makes sense through the lens of gatekeepers maximizing monetary investment and not any sense of commons. The system is designed to be this way.

1. It is Meth-, not Met-amphetamines.

2. Your handle may fit the same pattern of appropriation you are complaining about… indigenous is spelled differently and unlike Meta/Alphabet, describes a set of people.

1. Depends on the language. In most languages it's different variations of metamfetamin.

"In organic chemistry, meta indicates the positions of substituents in aromatic cyclic compounds."

Although I'd rather associate the company formally known as facebook with metastasis.

Doesn't the meth in methamphetamine regret to the methyl group that it contains?

Probably, meta-something is usually delimited by a dash and quite rarely used.

Yeah you caught me there. If it was easier to change the username on hacker news I would have done that already.

But what gets is me these companies can trademark and fight anybody who tries to use that commonly used term, I cannot fight anybody as an individual even though my username would have been Meta in all the social media platforms before Facebook decided to own this name.

Apple

It's funny because during everyday life the company Apple doesn't interfere with my use of the word apple at all?

It does for me: Apple gets automatically capitalized by my phone when swyping. That's about it though.

I ate an apple. My favorite fruit is apple. I have an apple in my backpack. The teacher has an apple on her desk. I saw an Apple. I picked up an Apple. I threw the Apple away. I mean the Apple fruit.

Hehe, the autocorrect was smart enough to understand some places where it shouldn’t capitalize the word “Apple”, but it mistakingly capitalized the word for a lot of sentences as well. In all of the sentences in the paragraph above I wanted the lowercase variant. I am typing this on an Apple iPhone.

I ate an Apple. My favorite fruit is an Apple. I have an Apple in my backpack. The teacher has an Apple of her desk. I saw an Apple. I picked up an Apple. I the the Apple away. I mean the Apple fruit.

This is Swype on my android phone.

The parent might be referring to the dispute between The Beatles (Apple Corp) and Apple Computer (which later became Apple Inc.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

Unless you own a Cafe ... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/07/apfelkind-cafe...

(And yeah, they lost that case, but a law case against Apple is nothing a Cafe owner expects)

Facebook is metastasizing (spreading out because you have exhausted the local energy supply and need to spread out to stay alive.

I get your point, but... nobody is going to call it Meta, much like nobody calls it Alphabet. They pick names like that for that reason, I think... they're generic and bland and make it really hard to get riled up about. "Meta is evil" doesn't have the same ring to it, ya know?

(Not to add fuel to the fire, but Block is another recent example of this.)

Beige Key is kind of like the Copper Key in Ready Player One? Did Mark just go HAM in his book club the month that they read Ready Player One like two years ago? /s

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