Policy

What’s in a name? If the name is Meta, a lawsuit.

This David v. Goliath fight says as much about Facebook as it does about the state of trademarks in America.

A big Meta logo boxing a small MetaX logo.

The company formerly known as Facebook is already well on its way to doing for VR precisely what it did for social media.

Illustration: Christopher T. Fong/Protocol

In late July of 2017, thousands of sweaty concertgoers crammed into Randall’s Island Park in New York City for the three-day annual Panorama Music Festival. Headliners for the weekend included Frank Ocean, Solange and A Tribe Called Quest, but there was more than music to keep people entertained.

Beneath a bright white dome inside the park was a sensory overload of an art installation called The Lab. The VR- and AR-heavy show featured exhibits where attendees could “cover the sky in a string quartet of rainbow-colored blocks” or embark on “a warped, intergalactic survival adventure,” as one reviewer described it at the time. The Lab, which was in its second year at Panorama, was praised by Rolling Stone as a “groundbreaking virtual-reality experience.”

It also apparently had a fan at Facebook. In August of 2017, an executive at the social networking giant emailed Justin Bolognino, the founder of the small VR company that curated The Lab, to tell him how “AMAZING” and “spectacular” it all was. Before long, Facebook was teaming up with Bolognino’s company to pitch a project that would meld AR with AI.

The name of this little VR company Facebook hoped to partner with? Meta.

These details come from a lawsuit Bolognino’s company filed in July for, well, the obvious reasons. The lawsuit alleges that, despite their friendly history, Facebook (as we’ll call it in this story) willfully infringed on Meta’s trademark when it noisily renamed itself Meta in late 2021. Not only did Facebook change its name, the suit argues, but it began swallowing up Meta’s business in the live VR event space, setting up installations at some of the very same venues where Bolognino’s Meta had previously mounted shows and even featuring some of the very same artists in those shows.

Festivalgoers use VR headsets inside The Lab Powered by HP during the 2017 Panorama Music Festival at Randall's Island on July 30, 2017 in New York City. Festivalgoers use VR headsets inside The Lab during the 2017 Panorama Music Festival at Randall's Island. Photo: Rebecca Smeyne/Getty Images for Panorama

Meta’s side of the story certainly fits neatly into the prevailing narrative about Facebook, which has a history of borrowing — or outright buying — its best ideas from smaller, lesser-known competitors. But Meta will need to show Facebook to be more than just a bully. The legal case may end up saying as much about Facebook as it does about the state of trademark protections today.

Researchers have found that there really aren’t many unclaimed words left to trademark, leading to a lot more dumb corporate names in the world (Who could forget Tronc?), a lot more lawsuits and a much trickier environment for smaller players, who can’t afford to trample on competitors the way Facebook can.

“We are out of good names,” said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School. “This is going to keep happening. It’s not an accident that there are a whole bunch of these cases, because it’s a very crowded field at this point.” The more crowded it becomes, the harder it is for companies to defend their trademark in the first place.

Facebook didn’t respond to Protocol’s request for comment, and Bolognino declined a request for an interview. But according to the filing, Facebook has argued in negotiations with Meta — whose corporate name is MetaX — that they offer “drastically different goods and services” because Facebook is, first and foremost, a “social technology company.”

We are out of good names.

Whether Meta will be able to successfully lay claim to its name, even against another company in the VR space, will reveal a lot about how narrow trademark rights have really become. “The allegations certainly are concerning, and the claim is plausible on its face,” Tushnet said. “But whether that means little Meta has rights against big Meta is far from certain.”

Based on the complaint, Meta has a lot going for it. It’s accusing Facebook of a type of trademark infringement called “reverse confusion,” in which the company that adopts a name second — in this case Facebook — is actually bigger and more famous than the one that adopted the trademark first. To test whether Meta is correct, the court will apply an eight-part test that considers, among other things, the similarity of the products, the defendant’s good faith in adopting the name and the sophistication of the consumers who might engage with the brand.

On all of these tests, Meta comes out on top, said Alexandra Roberts, a professor of law and media at Northeastern University. When it comes to the similarity of the product, Roberts said, “It’s really hard to deny they’re basically offering the same service.” Indeed, in Meta’s complaint, the company details how Facebook, under the Meta brand, has put on live VR experiences at South by Southwest, Coachella, The Smithsonian and the Cannes Lions festival — all events where Meta had previously held VR shows of its own.

“This is not a scenario I would wish on my worst enemy,” Bolognino told CNBC when the lawsuit was filed. “When Facebook stole the Meta brand from us, it just completely decimated our business.”

The allegations that Meta and Facebook had a relationship prior to Facebook’s rebrand may also count against the tech giant, as courts assess whether it was acting in good faith in assuming the name, Roberts said. “That’s not the most important factor, but it can be important thinking about damages,” she said.

And even though the event organizers that hire Meta for its VR services might be quite sophisticated, Roberts said, the average concertgoer wandering through the event “might not be paying a lot of attention.”

When Facebook stole the Meta brand from us, it just completely decimated our business.

But while Meta’s version of events is compelling, it’s only half the story. A global tech giant like Facebook, with its army of expensive lawyers, doesn’t just dismiss the existence of another similarly situated company of the same name without giving it some thought, said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “Usually in a situation like this, if there’s someone the trademark lawyers thought was a real threat, they would try to buy them out before launching the rebrand,” Goldman said. In fact, Facebook did just that when it acquired the trademark belonging to Meta Financial Group for $60 million. “I’d like to see Facebook’s answer to this,” Goldman said. “I’d like to see what is the basis on which they decided to make a run for it.”

It could be, for instance, that Facebook determined the trademark space for the term “meta” was already crowded. “When it’s such a crowded field, each trademark owner has a very small slice of the overall terrain,” Goldman said, noting that he found more than 2,500 hits for trademarks including the term “meta.” “That tells you the word meta has been used by lots of trademark owners over the course of the years.”

Another possibility, Tushnet said, is that Facebook determined the term “meta” wasn’t a very strong trademark, since it’s so closely related to the metaverse. “The theory is, if you choose something that’s really, really descriptive of what you are, you just don’t have very broad rights,” Tushnet said. “The advantage you get should be from the reputation of your product or service — not from how easy it is to understand what you do.”

Meta unveils its new logo. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Whatever Facebook’s reasoning, it’s certainly not alone among tech companies facing trademark infringement suits. Amazon settled a suit with a Springfield, Missouri-based trucking company, Prime Inc., last month, after the company said Amazon’s Prime service could cause “irreparable harm” to Prime Inc. Uber similarly settled with a cloud computing company called Uber Operations that said it was bombarded with angry messages from Uber passengers. “It’s an economy-wide problem,” said Goldman. “There really aren’t any good solutions to it. There are just solutions with tradeoffs.”

In all likelihood, experts say, Meta’s case against Facebook will end in a settlement, with Meta walking away with damages and perhaps a rebrand, and Facebook writing the payout off as a rounding error as it continues its existential pursuit of the VR business.

If that’s the case, it might be a little more painful and pricey for Facebook than it would have been if it had bought out Meta before changing its name. But it won’t do much of anything to solve the underlying concern raised in Meta’s complaint and vexing regulators and lawmakers around the world — the idea that Facebook didn’t just take Meta’s name, it’s consuming the entire industry and some of its most promising competitors. The Federal Trade Commission is, at this very moment, seeking to block Facebook from acquiring another VR startup called Supernatural, arguing that Facebook is “trying to buy its way to the top.”

The company formerly known as Facebook is already well on its way to doing for VR precisely what it did for social media. That will be true no matter what its name is or how much it has to pay to keep it that way.

Facebook may be Meta now, but it’ll always act like Facebook.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins