Technology

I saw this weird panel for a famous university (can't remember which one) that interviewed Mark's wife. She said that they run by everything past Mark for final sign off and also he comes up with a lot of the ideas. This smells like a Mark's own original idea.

Didn't they do the same thing to Meta? Aren't they being sued now?

you're right in almost everything

Seems clear cut and Meta will likely have to change the name.

Meta has a massive amount of resources, I'm sure they can afford more lawyers than the British company. Courts tend to favor the one with most resources, so the smaller company will have a very hard time trying to make Meta to change their app's name.

It should be easy to rename as no one is using it.

But seriously, this is the kind of bullshit those monopolistic companies are doing all the time. Another infuriating one was with Google's Go language. Author contacted them that he was using the name for 10 years and even had a book written about the language, but they basically just went with it anyway, because he was nobody and they were Google. Also, this is speculating, but I won't believe when they came up with the name they didn't use their Google to look the name up, probably that's why they closed the issue so quickly.

Threads is a cloud-based intelligent message hub that captures, transcribes, and organizes all of a company's digital messages, emails, and phone calls into one easily searchable database.

B2B is a completely different marketplace than B2C, and “internal search index of company’s digital messages” is a different industry than “social media app.”

The company’s own trademark registration indicates the trademark applies to “computer software, software and apparatus for the extraction of business information and knowledge.” That doesn’t sound like a social media app to me, either.

Did you even read the article??

It appears that Meta was aware of Threads before launching its platform of the same name. Company lawyers made four offers to purchase the domain 'threads.app' from Threads Software Ltd from April 2023, all of which were declined. Meta announced Threads in July 2023, the same time that the British company says it was removed from Facebook.

They literally made an offer to buy the domain Threads.app 4 times and got rejected.

You think they were unaware?

You don't trademark the word "threads", you trademark it within the context of the industry you're in

I can make a shop that sells pies and call it "Apple"

Someone was able to trademark the word "Apple", so that's not so surprising

Are you sure UK court allows it ? Because they filed in UK.

Not an expert on trademark law, but I think "Threads by Meta" would not work as the main part of that name would still be "Threads", "Meta Threads" could work, but if they'd make the "Meta" part not prominent in the branding then again it would probably be considered as only "Threads".