Back in October 2010 we told you about a lawsuit for trademark infringement that Facebook filed against the site Faceporn.com
Yesterday a federal court affirmed a lower courts order throwing the case out for “lack of personal jurisdiction” against the owner of Faceporn.com
The owner of Faceporn is Thomas Pedersen of Bergen, Norway.
According to federal law for a nonresident defendant to be sued in the US they must be found commit an intentional act expressly aimed at the forum state and that caused harm that the nonresident defendant knew would likely be suffered in the forum state which in this case was California.
The previous judge ruled that Facebooke failed to “put forth factual allegations that suggest that confusion actually has occurred or that any of Facebook’s potential customers have been sidetracked to Faceporn’s website as a result of defendants’ conduct.”
I don’t see this being the end of this. I seriously doubt Facebook is going to let it go.
It would be helpful to see the Magistrate’s Report.
Is this available?
… so maybe Facebook doesn’t have legal rights to all domains with the words “Face” or “Book” in them after all.
Which is as it should be.
Well, apparently not if you are in Norway and use a registrar based in Norway. But if you are in the US, the outcome might be different.
Maybe Facebook can find some basis to ask Verisign to change the nameservers for faceporn.com to ones run by DHS, DOJ or something along those lines.
They could argue Faceporn is harming American intellectual property interests and American jobs or something like that.
It looks like Facebook may be going down in flames anyway. It appears they have been playing fast and loose with the NYSE and common investors.
I am bored with facebook, perhaps visit once a week to mention a few sites and that’s about it, i suspect so are many others, i sure don’t click on the ads and i only resent them more everytime i hear they are trying to own everytyhing with ‘book’ or ‘face’ in the title …….they don’t own the world
Up to a point. It just happens that Facebook didn’t prove their claims in this lawsuit, why is why they lost.
I somewhat wonder why Facebook didn’t file a UDRP instead. While they won’t be able to collect money damages, they could’ve had a shot at getting the domain.
Now before anyone starts at me, IIRC FacePorn essentially promoted itself as a porn social network. Their site’s down right now.