What do you get when you try and steal multibillion-dollar intellectual property that was, in turn, allegedly stolen from two college-aged twins? The answer: a really poorly named drink and a lawsuit that just might change everything.
Though it’s well-known that Facebook’s site has been blocked by the Chinese government for several years now, a recent court ruling shows that China is willing to protect some of the American social media company’s rights in that country.
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Facebook just won a trademark case against a Chinese beverage company that wanted to name one of its drinks “Face Book.” The Zhongshan Pearl River company had registered that name for one of its beverages back in 2014, but now a Chinese court has invalidated the registration. The court, based in Beijing, said that the attempt to trademark “Face Book” as a drink had “violated moral principles” with “obvious intention to duplicate and copy from another high-profile trademark.”
The Chinese court’s kindly view of Facebook’s trademark rights may have been affected by Mark Zuckerberg’s recent trip to China, during which he was accused of trying to buddy up to Chinese officials. Zuckerberg, whose wife is Chinese-American, is reportedly learning Mandarin, and he visited China in March and met with lots of bigwigs, including Communist Party leader Liu Yunshan and billionaire Jack Ma, who founded the commerce site Alibaba. He also took a run in Tiananmen Square, and was criticized for not wearing a face mask in the polluted city.
Intellectual property rights like trademarks have not in past been well-protected in China, but recently, experts have been seeing a change. Mark Armitage, a trademark lawyer at the European firm Withers & Rogers, said, “This ruling demonstrates that courts are beginning to take this problem seriously. This is all the more interesting, as Facebook is currently barred from operating in China.”
Still, Apple lost a trademark fight last week against a company called Xintong Tiandi, which trademarked “IPHONE” for leather products in China in 2010. “This appears to have been a case of ‘squatting,’ which… involves a Chinese company registering the name of a high-profile Western business in order to benefit by forcing the company to either buy it back or take the matter to court,” Armitage said.
There’s still no word on what the drink would have tasted like, but Zhongshan Pearl River is most known for porridge and milk-based drinks. But a drink called Face Book? Anyone can see that would taste like: loneliness and 13-year-old trolls.
Now if only someone would invent a Snapchat-themed doughnut, we’d really get shit started.