Kyle Clark and Aaron Pollak created "Designbook" last year. It's a website meant as place for entrepreneurs to meet collaborators, new team members, and investors.
The Vermont startup's name, however, has run into opposition from Facebook. The social-networking giant recently informed the Designbook founders that it would be opposing their trademark application.
"We don’t believe that any of our branding is related to theirs," Pollak said, in an article published yesterday by Boston magazine. "Our logo is completely different, different colors, different fonts."
Pollak and Clark say their name was inspired by the design books they used in school. It's a "really specific thing when you're an engineer... It's your prototype book, where you keep track of your projects, your ideas, and your inventions."Facebook hasn't commented on the situation, but Pollak describes it as a case of "trademark extortion and corporate bullying."
"What about a phonebook?" he asked. "What about a yearbook? What about a notebook or a scrapbook? All of those things have the name ‘book’ in them and the truth is, a lot of those things are an aggregation of profiles.”
Facebook has asserted rights to both the prefix "face" and the suffix "book" in the social networking space. The company has been through a few trademark brawls in recent years. In 2010, the company sued Teachbook, an online community aimed at schoolteachers, which fought back for a while before agreeing to change its name to TeachQuest in 2012. Other sites, like Placebook, agreed to change their name without a lawsuit. Adult website owner FriendFinder Networks created a site called FacebookOfSex, which, no surprise, folded after Facebook quickly filed suit.
Only parody site Lamebook appears to have emerged unscathed after its legal tussle with Facebook, which ended in a 2011 settlement.
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