Facebook has filed a major Lanham Act lawsuit against alleged cybersquatters (typosquatters) and websites/companies it believes are infringing on the company’s trademarks or branding. The entire filing can be followed directly on the Justia website. You can read a pdf copy of the lawsuit here.

Defendants named in this lawsuit include the following:

Cyber2Media, Inc., Daniel Negari, Cleanser Products, Counter Balance Enterprises Ltd., FB Promotions/Freebie Promos, Mackrooner Ltd. Inc., Newgate Services Ltd., Pioneer Enterprises Ltd., Rabbit Gogo Media LLC, SMTM Enterprises Ltd., YourTick, Zilt, Jacob Daniels, Jerry Hui, Ryan Johnson, Eric Jordan, Karrie-Lee Karreman, June Kimchi, Tim Meyers, Ankit Pandey, S. Pace, Elise Petri, Mark Risi, John Souza and Michael Suggs.

Prior to the lawsuit, Facebook used the UDRP system to recover domain names from companies that used its trademark in domain names. The company was previously awarded domain names like Facebok.com, Facebook.me, Facebook.ie, as well as a number of FB domain names owned by Domain Asset Holdings.

Some of the domain names that are referenced in the lawsuit are:

facebobk.com
facemook.com
wwwfacefook.com
ffacebook.com
facetook.com
wwwfacebookde.com
fbacebook.com
facebool.info
faecbook.com
facebooki.com

Bill Hartzer also has information about the lawsuit.

Thanks to Dan Cera for uncovering this and sharing information about it.

A while back, I set up a Facebook page for my blog. At the moment, there are 177 “followers” of Elliot’s Blog on Facebook, all of whom opted in to be a “follower.” Although I do have a bit of dialog on the Facebook wall, I prefer to discuss articles on my blog since the readership is far greater and it would be more information for others to read.

I often post links to articles from my blog on this Facebook page’s wall to let people know that a new post has gone up. I don’t post links to my articles on my personal Facebook page because I can assure you that none of my friends care about what I am posting on my business blog. Therefore, the only people who should see these links are those who have opted in to my Facebook page or perhaps others if someone else posted a link on their own wall.

Yesterday afternoon, I tried to post a link to a new article and received an error message when I tried: “This message contains blocked content that has previously been flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.”

I assume this means someone reported a link to my blog as spam. I don’t believe a “competitor” actually reported the link, but having this happen leads me to believe a competitor could easily do this to another company (or ask someone unrelated to do it) and have the other company’s links blocked. This can be problematic for a company that is spending a considerable amount of money sending users to its Facebook page.

It shouldn’t be too difficult for a company to prove to Facebook that its links aren’t “abusive or spammy,” but if a company is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a well-timed marketing campaign, losing the ability to post links for a few hours or possibly days can be damaging.

I reported this issue to Facebook, and hopefully someone will look into it to see that my posting links to articles on my blog directly on my blog’s opt-in Facebook wall is not spammy nor is it abusive.

Although many people initially brushed off the lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia against Facebook, some emails allegedly from Mark Zuckerberg have been published that may bolster Ceglia’s legal case. These emails are being covered by a plethora of tech news blogs this morning.

Personally, I don’t have much interest in following this lawsuit, although there is one thing that is interesting for me to read. In one of the alleged Zuckerberg emails posted on CNet, Zuckerberg discussed the domain names that were available for the fledgling website to use:

“both original names >facebook.com and pagebook.com are unavailable, so there is no actual domain name either. thefacebook.com and thepagebook.com are both available but are clearly not a premium quality domain as they are much harder to remember.“

It’s interesting to read the domain aspect of this case if these alleged Mark Zuckerberg emails are real. As you know by now, the company went forward with TheFacebook.com and eventually acquired Facebook.com after the site launched. The subsequent emails, where they decided on using TheFacebook.com, would have made for an interesting read, too.

I didn’t know it was almost called PageBook.com.

Thanks to George Kirikos for the tip.

On my personal Facebook page, I have been reluctant to accept friend requests from people I don’t know or with whom I haven’t done business. I figure I am open about my business and my life enough on my blog, so there’s no real need to do that on Facebook, too.

I did set up a business page on Facebook from my blog, and if you “like” the page, you’ll get wall posts and updates when I write an article, and you are welcome to discuss the article on Facebook.

As Facebook continues to grow, I may integrate it further on my blog, and I may enhance my FB page. I know Techcrunch recently changed their comment section to Facebook comments, meaning that people can only post via their Facebook account. I like that idea because it can help eliminate anonymous comment trolls that seem to thrive on posting BS without any credibility.

If you are an avid Facebook user, please follow along on Facebook!

A couple of months ago on Ycombinator, someone mentioned that he sold a domain name “to some woman claiming inexorably to want it for “just a personal homepage,’” but it turned out the company that acquired it appeared to be Facebook. The domain owner had sold the name for $1,500.

Although the information on the Whois record lists Facebook as the domain registrant, the email address on the record is globaladmin@lovellsnames.org. So who the heck is Lovells?

I did a bit of research, and it looks like the globaladmin@lovellsnames.org email address is connected to a number of very good domain names. Some of these names appear to include:

• Play.com
• Loco.com
• Elegant.com
• FB.me
• Facebook.at
• Bin.com

There were a number of other domain names, including some Facebook ccTLD domain names, but these are the most notable names I found during my cursory search.

I did notice a non-descriptive domain name that had the same registrant email address, and it might give a clue about Lovells. HoganLovells.com is registered to that same email address. Hogan Lovells is pretty huge law firm with over 40 offices around the world.

As Mike Berkens once wrote, the “1st Rule Of Dealing With Domain Offers Is: People Lie.“

It looks like Facebook is already putting its FB.com to good use, and it’s not just for internal corporate email addresses. Visitors and companies can now use FB.com to shorten vanity URLs for corporate and personal pages.

Instead of visiting a page like Facebook.com/DogWalking, you can now visit FB.com/DogWalking, and you’ll end up on the same page. Similarly, you can visit FB.com/MarkZuckerberg or whatever the vanity URL is.

This may not seem like such a big deal since it only saves 6 letters, but in a world of 140 character tweets and short updates, it’s probably going to big deal to some people.

Thanks to George for the tip.