Ask HN: Facebook is threatening me for owning facebookrebrand.com

7 points by joshruby16 ↗ HN
Any advice? They say that if I sell it, they can sue me for 100K.

15 comments

[ 169 ms ] story [ 1581 ms ] thread
My only advice would be not to take advice from opposing council; seek your own legal advice from lawyers hired by you.
This is the canonical answer. Lawyer up, unfortunately.
(comment deleted)
Certainly, I'm not a domain attorney. However, as someone who runs a domain name protection company, my advice is to one of two things:

- Log into your domain registrar and delete the domain in your account. That will make it available for registration again, giving FB a chance to register it.

- Respond to them and work with them to transfer the domain to them.

This is clearly, undoubtedly a trademark domain. Any UDRP or lawsuit that is filed would most likely not result in your favor. It's not worth your time, hassle, and money to continue to own that particular domain. I'd put your money into a good generic keyword rich domain name instead. That's my personal opinion.

But if you DO decide to seek the advice of counsel, whatever you do ONLY deal with a qualified domain name attorney. Domain name legal issues require specialized knowledge. Unfortunately there are IP lawyers and others that will give you advice but don't necessarily have direct experience dealing with domain names.

Why would this be an infringement if no one would get confused between this site and facebook itself?

Actually, I just looked into this a bit. It seems like they just do this to anyone who owns a domain that has "facebook" in it. Don't think that they're actually that serious - probably a bot.

MSFT bullied MikeRoweSoft.com owner into submission.

So unless you have $1M stacked for legal fees, give it up.

However their letter essentially means they afraid that you'll transfer it to more legally powerful chest and that could cause more trouble for them down the road - with someone they can't bully as easily.

This domain name is worthless by definition, so i suggest to give it up. Possibly even consulting with lawyer how to "properly" give it up to avoid issues.

You're stepped into FB legal mafia land and might need to thread carefully to escape it clean and whole.

Is there context for this threat? Did you offer to sell it on a marketplace or host offensive/brand-damaging information?
sell it for 250,000
why sell it?

Make a page where people vote what will be the new name of facebook. Send it to random idiots on facebook, they 'll share it everywhere. $profit

Good idea! Can you help? i'll split the $ with you. it's shleiby at gmail
Lots of funny suggestions here. I used to have facebooksleaze.com [1], on which I posted links and a money quote from news articles about facebook. Within about two years it was DoS'd by someone who knew how to do it without disturbing a couple of other sites hosted on the same server and who didn't exploit anything else on it. Is there a way you can set up a honeypot and sue the attacker for a billion dollars?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150225074006/http://facebooksl...