Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like the Female Startup Club.

In today's episode is November 2021's income reports. This one is a doozy Fire Nation. We actually go back over the first six months of 2021 and give you a little taste of each month the highlights so to speak.

But before we go into that I want to go over our gross income for November was $199,548. Our total expenses were just over $17,000 for a net profit of $182,289 for a 91% net profit to overall gross revenue.

And we will get into those numbers and more when we get back from thinking our sponsors.

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All right fire nation we are ready to kick things off and we're going to spice things up a little bit we're actually going to be having David lizard brand share the legal tip right off the top here we're going to be getting into Facebook's meta trademark conflict super interesting.

So strap in and David take it away.

Hi guys thanks for having me again to discuss a very important legal topic this time we're talking about Facebook's meta trademark conflict so if you've been living under a rock.

I'm here to tell you that in October 2021 Facebook announced that it was changing the name of their company to meta META.

So the conflicts have already started to pop up around the brand name so the question is if Facebook can run into trademark problems what does this mean for a small startup business or even a solo entrepreneur.

It's hard to imagine Facebook just assumed that a reasonably common four letter word was fully available and nobody was using it in connection with related goods or services which is really what we think about most of the time we're talking about trademark issues.

So the name is a trademark the name of a business the name of a company the name of a product those are all trademarks and we really discuss and consider is somebody using this mark or something similar for related goods or services.

And this all leads me to wonder did Facebook slash meta now fail to do their due diligence or do they just not care so the key issue at the moment in the US at least is the prior pending United States patent and trademark office trademark application.

For the word meta META for a series of products like computers laptops portable computers things like that that application was filed on August 23rd 2021 and the application claims that the mark meta was in use in commerce in connection with those goods at least as early as November 1st 2020.

So you know more than a year ago now and use in commerce means we're actually selling these products bearing this brand name so maybe you buy a computer keyboard whatever it may be and it would actually say meta on it or on the packaging or somehow that would be clearly the brand name for the product.

And again that was long before there was any public discussion that I know of a Facebook's plans to change their name specifically their plans changed the name to meta.

The owner of that prior meta application is a company called meta PC LLC they're based in Arizona they have a pretty good sense of humor about the issue you can check the the written version of this income report which the link to here in the end of this audio because you can see there the meta companies tweet about it is pretty funny.

But you know they also responded this Arizona company called meta they told TMZ that they would sell their brand to Facebook for $20 million so you know they are definitely taking it seriously on November 8th the plot kind of thickened someone and we don't know who at this point I will allow you to speculate filed a letter of protest with the deputy commissioner for trademarks at the United States trademark office.

The deputy commissioner then passed along to the examining attorney assigned to that trademark application a statement to the effect that the Arizona companies meta application may be in conflict with yet another prior trademark filing this would be a registration for the word meta META so again now we have another prior filing for the word meta which is for downloadable computer software for capturing and storing screen data for the purpose of pattern recognition and machine learning.

Definitely something that is let's see let's say at least related to what Facebook is doing someone's playing hardball here meaning maybe Facebook filed this letter of protest or they had somebody file it to try to block the application made by this Arizona company but by doing that they're also stating that there's another company before then that was using the same name has a trademark registration for goods and services that are arguably related it's all become a very complicated mess.

Now if the whole rationale for Facebook's name change was to freshen up and rehabilitate the company's image they called it quote a reflection of how much Facebook had evolved why would they walk into a fight with the small computer manufacturer they really probably could just work something out with them on the slide beforehand using non disclosure agreements a big chunk of cash to keep it hush hush Facebook's got plenty of money they got plenty of lawyers to figure this out bottom line is sometimes a rebrand is the right move for a company large or small.

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