Facebook Sues Teacher Resource for Using the Word "Book" - Marco Spoerrle

Facebook Sues Teacher Resource for Using the Word "Book" - Marco Spoerrle

Facebook is suing a company called Teachbook, which operates a social networking site for teachers, apparently because it has "book" in its name and "competes" with Facebook. Teachbook is described as "a professional community for teachers". Sounds like a threat to Facebook's existence doesn't it?

Do you think Facebook should be suing Teachbook? Tell us what you think.

Ryan Tate at Valleywag draws on some irony, saying, "Imagine: Someone ripping off the name of an existing social networking tool for his own site. Why, that hasn't been done since 2004 when some punk kid at Harvard registered TheFacebook.com while college administrators were already developing their own 'online facebook.'"

The beginning of the suit reads:

Facebook has become a worldwide social, cultural and political phenomenon. With fame comes imitation. Here, Defendant Teachbook.com LLC rides on the coattails of the fame and enormous goodwill of the FACEBOOK trademark. Misappropriating the distinctive BOOK portion of Facebook's trademark, Defendant has created its own competing online networking community in a blatant attempt to become Facebook "for Teachers." Despite Facebook's protests, Defendant has willfully and deliberately persisted in its misappropriation of the Facebook brand, forcing Facebook to protect its user community and the strength of the Famous FACEBOOK trademark through this action.

They're protecting us - the user community.



When a user (teacher) joins Teachbook, the site promises the ability to manage a professional profile and all info in the account by choosing to share with admins, colleagues, parents, or public. It lets teachers create lesson plans, instructional videos, and other teaching resources. It lets users manage their classroom communications with secure parent-teacher communication tools (gradebook, events calendar, classroom newsletter, homework space). It lets teachers communicate with colleagues through discussion, chat, blogs, etc. It lets them create and manage online courses and instructional modules. It lets teachers manage student grades by recording, calculating, and sharing them within the Gradebook. (I wonder if Facebook knows they're using the word "gradebook" too).

Facebook drops the following stats in its case for why others shouldn't be able to use the word "book" in their names:

- Facebook has over 500 million active users

- Those users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.com.

- Facebook is the second most trafficked site in the U.S.

- Over 150 million Facebook users also engage with FB through third-party sites each month

- Over a million sites have implemented tools Facebook makes available

- Through Facebook, users can interact with over 900 million objects (individual and community pages, groups, and events) and 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.).

"Through this usage, Facebook has permeated the web and Facebook users are accustomed to seeing and expect to see Facebook across the world wide web, not just on the Facebook site," the suit proclaims. "Facebook, and its FACEBOOK trademark, are famous."

The suit also mentions that Facebook owns a number of U.S. registrations for the mark FACEBOOK, covering a variety of goods and services, such as online networking services, chat functions, electronic media, online journals with user-defined content and electronic publishing services, and software to enable uploading, tagging, and sharing of electronic media or info.

By this logic, other companies that use either "Face" or "Book" may have to fear. It's unclear what the company's stance on the word "the" is, as Facebook was first called "The Facebook". "The" is only slightly more common than "book", especially in the teaching profession, I would imagine. Since "the" is no longer part of the Facbook brand, I'm guessing they won't pursue that.

It's also worth noting that Facebook just launched a product called "Facebook Places" , even though Google (their direct competitor) already had a product called "Google Places".

This suit comes at a time when Facebook is becoming much more integrated with not only the web, as the company pointed out, but the real world as well. Facebook Places is bringing physical locations to Facebook, and other third-parties are also coming up with different ways to connect physical objects (not just places) to Facebook. Watch out, books!

The entire suit can be read here (pdf).

FBI Picks a Fight with Wikipedia - Marco Spoerrle

FBI: Take Down Our Seal, Wikimedia Foundation: No.

This week, the New York Times and BBC News both reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has sent the Wikimedia Foundatation a letter, ordering the removal of an image of the Bureau's seal from its Wikipedia entry. The Wikimedia Foundation's response thus far has basically  been, "no."

The NYT provides copies of both the FBI's letter, and the Wikimedia Foundation's response. Pretty entertaining stuff. The FBI's letter, signed by Deputy General Counsel David C. Larson, begins:It has come to our attention that the FBI seal is posted, without authorization, on Wikipedia at the following site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-FBIShadedSeal. svg . As the site itself notes, "Unauthorized use of the FBI seal . . . is subject to criminal prosecution under Federal criminal law, including 18 U.S.C. 701."

The FBI Seal is an official insignia of the Department of Justice. Its primary purpose is to authenticate the official communications and actions of the FBI. Unauthorized reproduction or use of the FB I Seal is prohibited by 18 United States Code, Section 701, which provides:

Whoever manufactures, sells, or possesses any insignia, of the design prescribed by the [Department head] or any colordble imitation thereof, or photographs, prints, or in any other manner makes or executes any engraving, photograph, print, or impression in the likeness of any such insignia, or any colorable imitation thereof, except as authorized under regulation made pursuant to law, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both...

See the whole letter here (pdf).

The Wikimedia Foundation's letter, signed by General Counsel Mike Godwin, begins:

Dear Deputy Director Larson,

First, thank you for taking my call Thursday, and congratulations on your imminent retirement after so many years of service. It's unfortunate that on such an otherwise happy occasion I must inform you that the Bureau's reading of 18 U.S.C. 701 is both idiosyncratic (made especially so by your strategic redaction of important language) and, more importantly, incorrect.

I'm writing you, of course, regarding your recent letter reiterating the Bureau's invocation of 18 U.S.C. 701 and your demand for removal of the image of the FBI Seal on Wikipedia (images of which are widely available elsewhere, including on the Encyclopedia Britannica website, last I checked). You may recall that in my initial email response to your estimable Assistant General Counsel, Mr. Binney, I pointed to cases construing Section 701 and that, in a subsequent email, I broadly hinted that ejusdem generis, a standard accepted canon of statutory construction, demonstrates that this statute is inapposite to the use of an image of the seal on an encyclopedia.

It's clear that you and Mr. Binney took the hint, although perhaps not in the way I would have preferred. Entertainingly, in support for your argument, you included a version of 701 in which you removed the very phrases that subject the statute to ejusdem generis analysis. While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us...

See that whole letter here.

Clearly, the Wikimedia Foundation firmly believes that it is not in the wrong here, and is prepared to go to court with the FBI, if it comes to that, as Godwin notes in the letter.

be interesting to see if the FBI pursues this, as everyone else wonders why the FBI isn't focused on more pressing matters. I can't imagine what harm the FBI's seal is doing on a non-profit community encyclopedia site aimed at spreading knowledge.

Which side do you agree with? The FBI's or the Wikimedia Foundation's?
Let us know. 

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FBI, Marco Spoerrle, marcospoerrle.com, Advertising, Blog, Facebook, market your business, Spoerrle, Social Networking, Social Media, Security

By Chris Crum | Staff Writer

WebProNews IT Team Confirms Facebook "Leak" Not Much of a Story, Marco Spoerrle

Facebook has put a lot of people on edge about privacy in recent months, and while some of it may be legitimate concern, a lot of the discussion is simply getting blown out of proportion.

You've probably read about the infamous "leaked" list of user names this week, that a security researcher shared in a torrent. A bunch of companies have reportedly been downloading the info leading to some unnecessary paranoia. Our own IT department took a look at that torrent, and there's really nothing to get freaked out about. It just contains data that's already public (170,879,858 URLs by our count), as the "leaker" Ron Bowes told BBC News.

The biggest file is called facebook-urls.txt. The top of the file looks like this (with "xxxxx" representing the unique number associated with the accounts):

http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxxxx

Eventually, once you get past the dashes, they start looking like this (where the "xxxx" represents people's names):

http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxx-xxx-xxx/100001172054083
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx/100000816806409
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxx-xxxxxx/643427473

"So you could figure out somebody's name from the profile URL, but that's really about it,” our IT manager says. "Anything else, you'd have to actually go to the URL and crawl it."

And of course, these people are already in the Facebook Directory anyway, as Bowes noted. There's no other information.

From the README file included in the torrent, here are the list of all the files:

Filname                            Description
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
facebook.rb                     The script used to generate these files (v1)
facebook.nse                    The script that will be used for the second pass (v2)
facebook-urls                   The full URLs to every profile
facebook-names-original         All names, including duplicates
facebook-names-unique           All names, no duplicates
facebook-names-withcount        All names, no duplicates but with a count
facebook-firstnames-withcount   All first names (with count)
facebook-lastnames-withcount    All last names (with count)
facebook-f.last-withcount       All first initial last name (with count)
facebook-first.l-withcount      All first name last initial (with count)

Bowes said that collecting the data was in no way irresponsible and likened it to a telephone directory. On top of that, there's not any info to distinguish people with the same names apart from one another.

Facebook has also confirmed that the info in the list was already freely available online, and that "no private data is available or has been compromised."

This article from the Telegraph claims that the torrent contains info like profile pictures, lists of friends, etc. Our team says that's not true and that you'd have to re-crawl the profile URL in order to get that data.

The bottom line is that the info in the torrent is public info, just like any other personal info that is published publicly on the web that's out there for Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other crawler to index. Essentially, all that's really in the torrent is big list of URLs. Whoa!

The companies downloading the torrent for whatever purposes they have in mind, would probably be better served to just look at the directory. Facebook has a lot more users than 170,879,858.

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By Chris Crum

5 Common Facebook Tactics - That Don't Work! - Marco Spoerrle

There are about ten common Facebook marketing tactics. (You can probably think of more, but most are a derivative of one of these ten.) It may surprise you to learn that five of these tactics don't even work -- that's fully half! Now, no Fire God will suddenly appear to smite you if you happen to have done one of the following things. They are definitely mistakes, but they aren't irreversible. In fact, they're really only mistakes in one sense of the word.

My perception of these as "mistakes" isn't about breaches of the unwritten Facebook etiquette either - I dance on those lines myself from time to time.

 
Rather, I'm calling them mistakes from a perspective of effectiveness, versus the alternative behavior. Whether they're wrong in terms of just coming across as rude or politically incorrect is another matter altogether.

Having said that, off we go.


Mistake #1 - Posting Signature Links on Profile Walls with Your Introduction

I asked someone why they did this once, especially since I'd already been to their site and purchased the item they were selling on that page.

She said: "I saw someone else do it."

"How did it make you feel?" I asked.

"I felt kind of used. But I figured if that's what it takes to be successful, that's what I'll do, even if it doesn't seem quite right."

Now that's deep.

I understand though, because once I made the vow to become successful, I also made a vow to do "whatever it takes". At the time I thought it meant hard selling and being pushy. I later found it meant hard work, and doing what's right even if there's a lazier, easier way.

Even if this was once effective in terms of getting clicks from random profile visits, Facebook is now much more stream-driven than it is profile-driven.

And that's a huge part of why this is a mistake in terms of effectiveness.


Not to mention that people who see these postings as rude or attempts to spam can rémove or hide them. They may even drop you as a connection, which cuts you off not just from them, but from their network.

You're not missing out on anything by omitting that signature link. Your name, hyperlinked to your profile IS your signature link. If your profile is set up correctly, prospects will get to your site from there.


Mistake #2 - Pitching

If you want to pitch people on Facebook, purchase an ad on Facebook.

It doesn't have to be a Facebook ad - purchase one in a popular Facebook application. No matter how good your elevator pitch is in real life, it doesn't translate in online networking. Let me give you a hypothetical example from the real world.

Imagine you go to an after-work bar. People go there to relax with work friends, to meet potential mates, on actual dates, and to get to know other people in the business.

You're unwinding with colleagues when someone walks up, and without forewarning, tries to sell you some steak knives. When you stare blankly, they shrug, and move on to the next person.

We all may chuckle to ourselves, and wonder what that person is thinking... but are you ever the knife salesman when you're on Facebook?

Honestly, when I first came here, I was tempted to be.

Thank God my better judgement stopped me. I'm telling you that to say this - if you've been the knife salesman don't be ashamed, you didn't know any better. It's not like they issue marketing lessons with your incorporation papers.

Just make a vow, right now, to always check yourself before you post. Ask yourself "Am I Networking or Pitching?"
 

Mistake #3 - Artificial Bonding

I'd respect a person more who was upfront with me, and said they were hoping we could work together, or do some business, than someone who pretended to care about me in order to get me to have a conversation that they could then direct to their pitch.

I wouldn't purchase from them, at least not then. But at least I'd still respect them, which means I could change my mind in the future.

Pretending to like people until you get the chance to try to sell to them is really just pitching with a little bad foreplay first.

Bad foreplay isn't better than none at all.


Mistake #4 - Favoring Uphill Marketing Over Downhill Marketing

Again, this is a mistake in terms of how effective it is. In my own experience, as well as in case studies of clients, it always works out better when you create a fantastic marketplace presence and people are drawn to you in droves, seeking to do business with you, rathere than the alternative.

The alternative, of course, is when you go out and pursue customers and clients one by one.

That's not to say that you should stop advertising, bidding on projects, or being a go-getter in any way.

It means that while you're doing that, also create a situation where customers are flowing towards you, seeking you out, asking for help.

It's much less work to get from interest to sale when they come to you.

Mistake #5 - Fishing on Dry Land

A long, long time ago, I was in a network marketing company. Now defunct, the products they have greatly enhanced, possibly even saved, my life. The products were targeted to people who cared about being healthier and eco-friendly.

By Tinu AbayomiPaul (c) 2010

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