According to their site, Timelines.com “enables people like you to collaboratively record, discover and share history. It’s history recorded by the people, for the people.” Actually, it’s a cool idea but not exactly what Facebook is doing with their Timeline feature.
The trademark infringement suit claims that Facebook’s Timeline feature could “quite possibly eliminate” their entire business. The suit also claims that Facebook has hijacked “Timelines” Internet traffic. A quick Google search does show Facebook as the first result. But, Timelines.com doesn’t even appear on the first page. They also state that Facebook hijacked Facebook.com/timelines. But as of press time, that hijacking seems to have ended. Unfortunately, Timelines.com doesn’t have a robust Facebook timeline for us to see who else they’ve stolen ideas from.
Image: Gunnar Pippel/Shutterstock
Sharpy
Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 7:14 PMWho? Never even heard of this website.
Commander Shepard
Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 9:57 PM*Timelines.com
mr_crash
Monday, October 3, 2011 at 12:24 AMJust for anyone who’s interested – while I don’t have a subscription to whatever crazy service is required to view the application for that case, I did find this a TM with the number: 85432026 which was applied for on 26 September 2011.
This appears to be the mark in question. Their choice of forum (a state one, rather than a federal one) suggests they’d be claiming to have a common law trade mark prior to the date of application (or associated priority date. I’m not sure if the USA has any priority system or not).
They note first use in commerce there as 2009. Presumably they’d be looking to rely on that date.
There’s some related marks with numbers 77841615 and 77482582. I can’t link to them because the search tool at http://tess2.uspto.gov is a bit crap.
The utility of the new mark over the other two is that it has a better specification.
I suspect there’s some measure of trolling here (seems a bit silly to go with the registration process for the new mark otherwise, it’s been years since they’ve started using it…) but Trade Marks should be available to all, not just the big kids who can quickly build a reputation around a word. If they’ve got the term, Facebook should sort this out before running a product out the door. As a contrast to patents, Trade Marks are actually pretty easy not to step all over. Would have been 20 minutes of searching for their in house legal team – or a few letters to bang out an agreement before making it public.
Apple’s pretty notoriously bad at this – they had that business with Cisco and the iphone trade mark when it was new. In Australia, there’s also been an interesting application by Next Byte, to register “iConcierge” – which is interesting, if only for the fact that I’m sure Apple wouldn’t be too impressed with this and I would wonder why someone who’s got important sales agreements with them would want to risk their ire.
Swamykant
Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 9:53 PMI don’t find anything common..