Facebook + Vanity URL’s = FAIL for brands…

Recently Facebook unveiled their new vanity URL scheme to the public. It was a great plan and quite a bit of time overdue for Facebook. The problem in my opinion was that they opened it up to profiles and pages at the same time. This has created a bit of a problem with trademarks and copyrights on Facebook.

Lets say you were a brand that had a page with less than 1000 fans as of May 31st. You weren’t eligible to sign your brand up for a vanity page. Come saturday night a user comes on and sets up a vanity URL for their profile. Now there is someone essentially squatting on your trademark and potentially confusing consumers of your brand. Lets say you are XYZ company and you have a page, but didn’t qualify for the May 31st cutoff and someone else registers your URL. Whenever a consumer comes to facebook/xyz they will see a user’s profile page instead of your product.

There is also the issue of got there first. This happened with a brands that I know who are in the public space. Someone got on, started a new profile and registered that brand’s vanity instead of it actually being that brand. Now that brand also had a fan page that they had more than 1000 fans on and had intended on using that vanity URL for their fan page. They now find themselves out of luck with someone infringing on their brand name and having to wait for facebook or for their lawyers to act on it.

What facebook should have done in my opinion was take a staged approach to the issue and opened the gates up to pages first and then opened it up to the general public. It may have alleviated some of the problems that we are now seeing, some of which may have to be fought out in court.

On the downside, if you did register a vanity URL that is a trademark of another company, you will probably loose your account and everything you created… FAIL for users as well…

Here is the link to the trademark infringement form:
http://www.facebook.com/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1

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