Technology

Not so much in the UK, but we’ll just have to wait and see. It may just end up that, in the UK, they’ll be called ThreadsUK or some legally-acceptable variant of the name that “meaningfully distinguishes” them according to the court.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The UK courts will be inclined to favour the UK company over an American conglomerate. They have to operate within the confines of the law but the British government really do want to show that they can actually act against these big multinationals (they need the win) so there may be quite a lot of interest in this case.

I can totally see the courts been heavily encouraged to throw the book at them as much as possible.

It was sarcasm. Meta has lots of money.

And then figured they'd be fine if they deleted their Facebook account. If your Facebook account gets deleted you get deleted in real life, after all.

They already planned for this. They’ll settle out of court. It’s pennies to them and a planned business expense, like a fine

Well... Apple may come after your pie shop. You'll likely win if you have the resources to fight it.

Monster Cable, they fight anyone who uses the word "monster" including mini golf places

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/98013289

Tldr, monster Cable is ran by shit humans who like to litigate.

Twice.

And when Apple violated the agreement they made with Apple Music not to enter each other's industries (Apple Records couldn't sell tech and Apple Computers couldn't sell music), they successfully argued in court that iTunes wasn't selling music, but digital downloads...

I don’t know anything about UK law but in my observations, giant corporations with tons of cash and armies of ~~lawyers~~ solicitors do what they want. I could be wrong but it is just my cynical view, not legal advice.

Not an expert either, and I'm definitely not a lawyer. But I did take an elective class in uni on IPR.

Generally you can have two types of trademarks. You can use graphics as your trademark or a word. And your trademark must be unique to be defendable.

The word can't be something that is already in use, if you want to register it as a wordmark. Ie you can't register the word "beer" and market beer under that trademark. What you can register is alternative spelling or your logo.

The word "threads" is a word that was used previously. It has a meaning already. So you can't register it as a wordmark.

This is one of the reasons why alphabet really hates that people use the word "google" as a verb, or LEGO that people call the bricks "legos", as it diminishes the trademarkability of the word and thus makes defending the trademark harder.

If both companies tries to claim the word "threads" they'll have a pretty weak case. While I don't know exactly what this is about, I suspect that the headline doesn't give the full picture of the dispute.