Justin Bolognino, owner of a business called META, is suing Meta (the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) for allegedly stealing the brand name, CNBC reports. Bolognino has had his business for 12 years now, so definitely arrived at the name before Meta, and a legal scholar even believes he has a chance of winning the case.
According to Bolognino, Meta’s name change wasn’t just a funny coincidence, he says it completely dried up business for him. META is a business that creates augmented reality experiences for various events – the main reason for the Meta rebrand was also because the company wanted to shift its focus to the Metaverse.
Dyan Finguerra-DuCharme is working as Bolognino’s attorney in the case. She said that META and Meta have been negotiating for eight months. They have even been exchanging thousands of pages of information in an attempt to resolve the matter, but Meta will not come to the table to resolve the problem, she said.
Explaining the problems META now has, she continued on to say:
“Now my client goes out to try to market and promote its services, consumers now falsely and mistakenly believe that its services are coming from Facebook. … [META’s business has been] irreparably and irrevocably harmed.”
CNBC got the opinion of law professor Jessica Litman on the matter. She said that META could win its case against Meta, and that it may be easier for Meta to pay off META so that the latter changes its name. She warned that Meta is likely being careful about settling with META as there could be other companies out there with a similar name looking to get money too.