[heimidal]

If they have a registered, accepted trademark (and it appears they do), they can reasonably argue that Facebook has damaged their ability to establish the brand's identity despite significant outlay for design, marketing, and advertising -- those are dollars already spent. "Livelihood" includes income, sure, but it can also be read to include lasting damage done to their brand by Facebook prematurely usurping their ability to control the mark.

[munk-a]

That is true - unless their livelihood (they mentioned how low the offers were repeatedly) was just to squat the company name and extort FB or whoever else wanted it - especially if they got advanced knowledge of the renaming and registered it after they learned facebook would want it. It's like domain squatting all over again.

[heimidal]

"Squatting" a trademark generally isn't possible; if you can't prove use of the mark, the USPTO will simply cancel your registration. I imagine their activity related to the mark would be covered in any potential court proceedings and would be Facebook's primary defense.

[munk-a]

Yea - but having a github repository with active development and a meta-logo dating back to early 2021 would probably be pretty compelling to prove active use. This is definitely going to be a headache for somebody but I can't imagine the story as this letter tells it (FB reaching out repeatedly to acquire the name and then going ahead regardless) is a perfect telling of events. Either FB was totally unaware of this company's existence before today or else their lawyers looked over the company and didn't think it was a threat to their usage.

[pbhjpbhj]

Trade mark legislation, and passing off legislation, protect marks being used. They don't (in general) protect one's "ability to establish [a] brand's identity". That's the right way to do things IMO, brand camping wouldn't help society.

Prima facie it sucks but they can probably get global coverage for their product/services they're already selling (trademark registration requires current use, someone said the OP company have a trademark registered) on the basis of "what do we do now Facebook are using our name".

It seems likely that if they can't leverage this for financial benefit, in a forthright way, then they were going to fail anyway.

[mapcars]

Right, but as we don't see anything from this company let the court decide if and how big the damage is.