You may have read the stories about the recent lawsuit against Facebook in which Timelines.com claims the company infringes upon its “Timeline” trademark.
Here is a section from the court complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court 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.
There have been other reports today that Facebook is “delaying” its release of the Timeline feature, and that the root cause of that could be this particular lawsuit. See Mashable’s report:
The public launch of Timeline is now at least delayed until Tuesday, when representatives from Facebook and Timelines.com will meet again in front of another federal judge to debate whether an injunction should be issued against Facebook.
However, if you pay attention to the actual filing of the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO), you will see that Facebook contests that it has not changed any public release plans or dates for Timeline, as Mark Zuckberberg himself said at f8 that the company would release Timeline “in the coming weeks”, therefore the TRO was rejected by the judge and Facebook has delayed nothing.
You can read the full document here:
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