How many likes? The words “face book” won’t appear anymore in canned vegetables, bottled drinks and bags of potato chips as Facebook wins a trademark case against a Chinese company. (Photo : Getty Images)
If Facebook has yet to win the approval of the powers that be in China to capture the country’s more than 700 million Internet users, it recently emerged victorious in a trademark case against a local food and drink manufacturing company.
The Beijing Municipal High People’s Court ruled in April that Zhongshan Pearl River Beverage Co. Ltd. cannot use “face book” to label its products, according to the court’s website.
Based in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, Pearl River filed a trademark application at the Trademark Office of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce on Jan. 24, 2011. The Trademark Review and Adjudication Board approved the application in 2014.
The company wanted to use the words “face book” on its various food (canned vegetables and potato chips) and beverage products (tea, juices and coffee).
Part of the Beijing court’s verdict reads, “If the applicant applies to register a large number of well-known trademarks from other companies, intending to gain benefits by hoarding and transferring the rights, such acts must be stopped,” reported Shanghaiist.
Along with popular American sites Google, Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube, China blocks access to Facebook.
Seen as an apparent attempt to woo the overly huge Chinese market, the recent actions of Mark Zuckerberg, the American co-founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook, made news and earned him both praises and criticisms.
In March, he jogged through Tiananmen Square and posted a picture of it on his Facebook account; attended the China Development Forum in Beijing; and discussed “the future of Internet development” with Liu Yunshan, a senior Communist Party of China leader, reported CNN.
Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the giant social networking website had 1.65 billion monthly active users for the first quarter of 2016, according to Statista, an online statistics company.
In 2004, then Harvard students Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Zuckerberg founded Facebook, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. It gained a market value of $102.4 billion in May 2012.
The court ruling might as well be an advance birthday gift for Zuckerberg who will turn 32 on May 14.
