Facebook tries to shut out Lamebook
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Facebook is ramping up its considerable arsenal to silence Lamebook.com, the wisecracking website that curates and pokes fun at status updates, photos and comments from the giant social-networking site (with an emphasis on bawdy conversations and captions).
Facebook on Monday blocked links to Lamebook from anywhere on its site, shut down Lamebook’s fan page and was working diligently to prevent users from ‘liking’ the company on its pages, according to Lamebook and a Facebook confirmation on TechCrunch.
It was Lamebook creators Jonathan Standefer and Matthew Genitempo who lobbed the opening legal salvo. After Facebook threatened to take the company to court, Lamebook filed a lawsuit in Austin, Texas, early this month against the Palo Alto company. It asked the court to rule that the parody website did not infringe upon Facebook trademarks and that it is protected by the 1st Amendment.
Last week, Facebook filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit against Lamebook in federal court in San Jose, arguing that Lamebook is not legally protected parody because it does not ‘provide any critique or comment of Facebook itself.’
Meanwhile, Lamebook is seeking donations to its legal fund.
[Update: Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor said in a statement that blocking mentions of the phrase ‘lamebook’ on the site was ‘a mistake’ made ‘in the process of dealing with a routine trademark violation issue regarding some links posted to Facebook.’
‘We apologize for our mistake in this case,’ he said. ‘We are working to fix the process that led to this happening.’]
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-- Shan Li
