We have heard about people who have legally changed their name to a product, a celebrity's name or even a fictional character in the past. Now it looks like one person's act of changing his name to match that of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could bring some interesting legal issues along with it.
ZDnet reports that the whole story begins with Israeli resident named Rotem Guez who created a company called Likestore. This startup sells Likes on Facebook to advertisers. This actually violates Facebook's own policies but Guez's defense is that other US companies do basically the same thing he offers.
Guez then sued Facebook in July, claiming that the company wasn't going to return his Facebook profile to him. The problem? Facebook discovered that Guez was not only selling Likes, he was also creating false accounts on the service. In September, Facebook's attorney sent Guez a cease and desist letter for selling Likes on the service.
Guez then went to his native country's government to legally change his name to Mark Zuckerberg. He then established a new profile with his new name on Facebook which the service promptly disabled. It also sent a second cease and desist statement to Guez ... er, Zuckerberg.
This is obviously a huge publicity stunt on Guez's part. He knows he doesn't have a leg to stand on legally and now he's just being a gadfly with this move of "changing" his name to Mark Zuckerberg. The truth is he's going to lose this fight and it's going to cost him a lot more ultimately than the price he had to pay to change his legal name.
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