There is a possible related problem. A number of years ago some jerk who hates Dustin Diamond, who played "Screech" on the TV show Saved by the Bell registered DustinDiamond.com when the Web was in its infancy. He then put together what appears to be an incredibly amateurish website designed to give the impression that Diamond owns the site and was just too cheap and stupid to hire someone to do a professional-looking website.
It even got to the point where the guy who put up the site started letting people post all sorts of extremely vulgar sexually-oriented comments in the guestbook, giving visitors the impression that Diamond was the one allowing it and/or responding.
Diamond filed a complaint with ICANN and even hired a law firm to handle the complaint. ICANN ruled that the site is a parody site and therefore that is a legitimate non-infringing use and so Diamond could not get the name.
Here are some things to bear in mind about username squatting on Facebook.
- I’m guessing Mike Arrington can get this fixed with a phone call or two. (via Dave Winer) If you’re not him…
- You may have missed the fact there was, before username registration opened up, a form to complete for “preventing [your] trademarks from being registered as usernames.” That form is now closed, and links off instead to Facebook’s non-copyright IP Infringement Form. (Given its wording and stated purpose, I doubt it would have helped with non-trademark-registered individual names anyway.)
- Facebook (like Twitter, etc.) is not ICANN, and the UDRP has no application to its vanity URLs. Facebook’s terms of service, however, mandate that users not “take any action on Facebook that infringes someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.”
- Many jurisdictions, (including California where Facebook is headquartered), restrict or prohibit unauthorized use of a person’s “name, image, likeness or other unequivocal aspects of one’s identity.”
- It’s not “squatting” if someone else happens to share an individual’s name and was able to register it or a variation.
- All that said, it seems one’s first recourse as the victim of a username squatter is the aforementioned non-copyright IP Infringement Form.
I’d be interested in hearing about people’s experiences with this — whether it turns out to be streamlined and effective or frustrating and a pain. Let me know and I’ll update.
Previously: Chris Pirillo is socialsquatted; does the law care?
