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by shaneprrlt 2294 days ago
So if you started a small consulting company helping people advertise or build a brand on Instagram, and your website was instagrambusinesshelp.com, Facebook has the right to say "not allowed"?

Do I also have the right to impose rules on other businesses naming conventions [1], or no because I'm not a $500B company?

[1] In a fair use context, not blatant copyright/trademark infringement or posing as the company in a phishing context.

1 comments

There is no fair context for that under the law. The name is trademarked so unless you have approval from Facebook to use their trademark then using it is not legal. It's not that complicated.
Maybe domain names are treated differently from book titles, but I don't see why they should be. There certainly is fair use of trademarks in book titles if the use is descriptive, not likely to lead to confusion about who produced the book, and can't be effectively replaced with a more generic term. E.g. "That Popular Graphics Editor for Dummies" isn't a sensible substitute for "CorelDRAW! for Dummies".