Facebook faces a trademark lawsuit for its META rebranding

As it is well-known, Facebook rebranded itself as a company to META in 2021. The main goal was for this name to fit better with the future development of the company, and in particular with the emergence of the metaverse as a new virtual world.

Facebook filed a trademark for META, and this blog has already discussed the probabilities of potential legal conflicts taking into consideration numerous early registered trademarks for META around the world including in the US.

So it is of no surprise that a trademark infringement lawsuit has been filed in New York against Facebook by a company named METAx LLC.

This company claimed the use of the META brand since 2010 in relation to VR and augmented reality technologies. What’s more, the company owns two earlier US trademarks:

No. 5,194,332, registered in class 35: Organizing and holding special events for commercial, promotional or advertising purposes; Event planning and management for the marketing, branding, promotion or advertising of the goods and services of third parties; Social media strategy and marketing consulting focused on helping clients create and expand their product and brand strategies by building virally engaging marketing solutions; Special event planning for business purposes; Arranging, organizing and conducting live interactive marketing promotional events for business promotional purposes, and

No. 6,055,841, registered in class 41: Media production services, namely, video and film production; Entertainment, namely, production of community sporting and cultural events using digital, virtual and augmented reality filmmaking and interactive displays of lights, sound and motion; Special event planning for social entertainment purposes.

According to METAx, Facebook has been aware of its business and trademarks since 2017 when there was communication between both companies.

To what extent this lawsuit can be successful depends on the particular facts. What is for sure is that Facebook can face more similar conflicts in the future taking into account the bunch of early registered Meta trademarks for similar goods and services. One possible defensive strategy for Facebook could be to claim a low-distinctive character of the word META at least for services related to the metaverse.

In general, the main rule when someone wants to file a trademark is to check for earlier rights and to avoid possible conflicts which can lead to complex lawsuits and a lot of expenditures. Of course, there is another strategy, that however requires deep pockets for out-of-court agreements.

Source: Reuters.