Since 2012, a U.S. software company sells the app “Paper”. This name Facebook appropriated now on without comment.
Washington. Kittens, Eating Photos, Video Games: At his tenth birthday Facebook has become too confusing for many of its more than 1.23 billion users. “Paper”, a new app for iPhones that will bring order to the greatest of all social networks since Monday. Once the software to load on the Apple phone, you can organize the flow of messages, photos and messages as they see fit.
However, the introduction of “Paper” threatens to become a lot more problematic than it might have expected founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook. For “Paper” There are already: For more than two years, you can buy an app on iTunes for drawing under this name. It is so popular that Google, if you type “paper” typing, as the first search result is leading this product. In 2012 she was awarded the prize for best new Apple app.
Austrian founder
behind this software with which you can use an iPad as a sketch book, is a New York based start-up company with an Austrian-born chef and co-founder. Georg Petschnigg (36) founded in 2011 his company FiftyThree after a decade at Microsoft. As a developer of apps he is in regular contact with Facebook, a board member of Facebook has invested in FiftyThree. So Petschnigg can not quite believe that the same names his creation and the new Facebook product is random. “Why Facebook has chosen our name? There are so many other words, “he says in an interview with the” press “. When he learned last week by Facebook’s “Paper” project, he sent a polite letter with a request for injunctive relief to the responsible Board Chris Cox.
“Keep us all the steps before”
Because the names affair could be quite harmful to the business of Fifty Three. “Some of our investors thought., Oh, you have been bought ‘But if we are not,” Petschnigg, who spent his school days in Brussels said. “And we have not even sold the name to Facebook.”
The answer from California was as regretfully as binding. A mere apology is not enough but Petschnigg. The brand name “Paper by Fifty Three” he has made some years ago to protect the U.S. and in Europe. The word “paper” alone is not by registration in the U.S. Trademark Register protectable. The wide popularity of “paper” as a label for the product of FiftyThree but it prohibits Facebook after the American common law, to launch its own app under that name and for similar purposes.
Facebook silent
Petschnigg want to avoid it, fight out this dispute to court. “We still hope that Facebook remembers. The product has only existed since Monday on the market. “Without a fight he wants his spiritual creation but do not give up. “We are also preserve all the steps before.”
Facebook does not want to publicly explain his actions. A spokeswoman offered the “Press” merely to express their views on “off the record”, but could you quote it, not even with no name
.
(“Die Presse”, print edition, 02/05/2014)
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