Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Protect Yourself from Facebook

I’ve been known to pick on Michael Arrington. I think he’s a whiny self-important blowhard whose words are often not worth reading. Also, I’ve said as recently as last week that blogging may be in trouble. Today, I wish to compliment Mike, and give you an example of when blogging is the most useful tool anywhere.

A few days ago, Harman Bajwa was quite unpleasantly surprised when he found that Facebook had taken away his page. Why did Facebook do that? Because Harman’s given name matches the name of a big company, and they had claimed that he was violating their trademark.

Umm . . . no.

If I wanted to claim /pepsi as my Facebook page, or if I registered pepsi.com as an Internet address, then Pepsico would have a valid reason to grab their property from me. Even if I was a fan and saying only nice things about them, disclaiming any official links between us, and not making money, Pepsi would have every right to say I was using “their” name.

Unless, of course, my name was Pepsi.

Back to where I started, now: Facebook has given Harman back his page, and two interesting things crop up: Mike Arrington helped make it happen, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now friended to Harman.

Facebook did the right thing, and quickly. Since most newsworthy stories seem to be bad this is now a non-story, right? Yes, unless you simply want to point out that Facebook is a good citizen (this time). And no lawsuits were filed! Are you listening, Facebook PR Department?

Or unless you need a lesson in the way social networking works, and why you need to be on top of the techniques and issues that drive it.