Facebook sends out its lawyers
The owner of Facebook has entered into an unlikely legal battle with a Somerville student. David Nicholson, a third year Computer Scientist, was threatened with legal action last week over a website set up as part of his online business. Lawyers for the company claimed that Nicholson’s website, facebookquizzes.com, copied “the exact look and feel” of the Facebook site.
Heller and Ehrman, the company’s legal representatives, issued a ‘cease and desist’ demand and threatened the student with further action if he failed to comply. Facebookquizzes.com is a version of Nicholson’s current website, quizsender.com, which allows users to create and send their own online quizzes to friends. Nicholson creates different ‘skins’ for the site in order to sell advertising space to fi rms in niche markets �" in this case those who target Facebook users.
The website imitates the wellknown blue and white colour scheme and the distinctive layout of the original Facebook site. It also uses an identical font and a similar logo, and includes a link to the Facebook homepage. Nicholson fi rst became aware that there was a problem when he received an email from the lawyers on May 25, saying they were “very disturbed” by his actions. They demanded that he remove the site and hand over the domain name to Facebook.
The message stated, “You are infringing on Facebook’s trademark rights. Your web site is causing damage to Facebook’s business and brand. You registered and use the facebookquizzes.com name to divert our client’s customers to your website.” It continued, “We are very concerned that your use of our valuable brand will deceive customers into believing there is an affi liation between your Professional Internet Development or Quizsender.
om company and Facebook, when, in fact, you are not authorised to use our Facebook mark. Our client cannot allow this type of confusion and harm to continue.” By registering a domain including the Facebook trademark, the lawyers claimed that Nicholson was in breach of the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which allows companies to recover up to $100,000. Nicholson said he was initially very surprised to receive the letter.
He told The Oxford Student, “I think they misunderstood and that was a bit annoying. Lots of Quizsender users are Facebook users, so I thought it would be a good idea to make the site.” In an emailed reply to Heller and Ehrman, Nicholson claimed the website was not public. He said, “It seems that your cease and desist request is based on a misunderstanding. The server in question is a private development server that you did not have permission to access.
Although Nicholson complied with their demand of removing the new site from the web, he refused to give up the domain name on principle. “They assume legal jargon will get them their domain name, but I’m not just going to comply. They’re quoting a random law at me but I think they’re going to have a hard time showing that I’ve broken it. Facebook is quite a generic brand anyway, so they’ll fi nd it hard to enforce,” he said.
Nicholson, who has already been offered a job as a web developer for Microsoft upon graduation, is now waiting to receive a reply from Facebook’s lawyers.
1st Jun 2006