Recently, the Melbourne Trade Marks team hosted a client seminar entitled ‘Make your mark online’. In their presentation, Deborah Bell and Natalia Blecher focused on the growing opportunities and threats facing trade mark owners with the emergence of popular online social forums like Facebook and Twitter.
The impetus for this event came from Facebook Inc’s recent announcement that users will have the opportunity to personalise the URLs linked to the profiles and pages they operate on Facebook. Whereas the original URLs contained a string of unintelligible words, numbers and characters (www.facebook.com/profile1234576#@!%.html); personalised URLs (www.facebook.com/cocacola) are simple, easily remembered and help other users swiftly navigate directly to a particular profile or page. From a trade marks perspective, the concern was that our clients’ trade marks may be misappropriated by third parties looking to ‘squat’ on these URLs or infringe clients’ rights. Of equal concern was the risk that other trade mark owners (with legitimate rights in the same mark) would get in first and close off Freehills clients’ opportunities to operate on Facebook under a URL containing their exact mark.
The event was well attended by clients such as Spotless, Ego Pharmaceuticals, Country Road, Regal Cream, Funtastic, University of Melbourne, Pacific Brands and 1300 Australia. The feedback so far has been extremely positive with clients commenting that the topic was ‘refreshing and practical’. A few clients have requested this presentation be rolled out to their internal marketing teams.
This article was written by Deborah Bell, Solicitor, Melbourne.
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