Facebook beats restraining order, but Timeline delayed

October 3, 2011 By Mike Flacy

With Facebook Timeline poised to launch across all current Facebook user accounts, the social networking company was forced to deal with a possible restraining order from a rival Web company.

Last week, Facebook was sued by Timelines Inc. for trademark infringement after Facebook made its announcement about the new Timeline feature for profiles. The company is arguing that Facebook’s use of the Timeline name will eventually put Timelines Inc. out of business. Representatives for Timelines Inc. requested a a restraining order against the launch of Facebook Timeline in hopes that a judge would agree that the ”Timelines” trademark is valid. However, Judge Edmond E. Chang of Chicago did not grant the restraining order for the company. The judge did request that Facebook keep the court informed as to how many users have access to Facebook Timeline.

As of this week, a bit over one million users are already accessing Facebook Timeline. While likely developers, many curious users simply registered as a developer in order to gain early access to the new design. The original date for a wider launch of Facebook Timeline was supposed to occur on September 29, but Facebook has pushed it forward to October 6 for reasons related to this lawsuit or technical glitches. After the initial announcement of Facebook Timeline, anyone that searched for the Timelines Inc. fan page were redirected to the main page for Facebook Timeline. Facebook has corrected this oversight and the Timelines Inc. fan page can now be found through Facebook’s search function.

While the court case between Facebook and Timelines Inc. is still pending while waiting on the official judge, public opinion on the Timelines Inc. fan page has been consistently negative since the attempted restraining order. Representatives for the Timelines Inc. fan page only recently started posting content on the page as of October 1. The last official post from the company previous to that was made on June 15. Negative comments from fans of the page have be focused on greed, fame and the design of the Timelines.com home page.

Showing 2 comments

jesterking at 4:21am 4th October 2011 Sooooo... Just because a company used the name "Timeline" as their company name, no one is allowed to use the term "timeline" in any of their products? Hummm... Sounds ridiculous to me. So next time I see a news piece where they give you a "timeline" of events, I expect Timelines Inc. to sue them.Ridiculous lawsuit is ridiculous. Not that I like facebook, or their corporate practices (because I really really don't), but at what point do you just say: "cool story bro"?
dame it at 11:43pm 3rd October 2011 agree!you can't just jump and steal other peoples historical name they tried to promote for many years. just being popular with teenagers and build a web application to stalk a piece of other people's privacy and making money off them!