Facebook Sued Over New Timeline Feature

According to Mashable, Timelines.com has filed a lawsuit against Facebook's use of its new "Timeline" feature that will be rolling out to users soon. Timelines.com claims that, if Facebook continues with its current plans to rollout the new feature, it "will essentially eliminate Timelines.com" and cause users to believe that Timelines.com is associated with Facebook.

Facebook's Timeline feature was unveiled last month and is a completely redesigned profile view for users of the social network. It allows others to see all of a friend's activity on Facebook since he/she joined the social network in a timeline view. On the other hand, Timelines.com is a website that allows users to create multimedia-based timelines about events in history. 

Timelines.com owns the trademarks for "Timelines," "Timelines.com" and "Timelines&design" in the United States. The website is obviously claiming trademark infringement against Facebook.

Facebook's use of the term "Timeline," and its redirection of Internet traffic from Timelines' Facebook page to Facebook's new "Timeline" offering, infringes on Timelines' federally registered trademarks in that it causes confusion as to the source of the services offered to users of the Internet. Indeed, Facebook's "Timeline" offering and its misdirection of users attempting to access Timelines' offering is intended to prevent Internet users from accessing information about Timelines.com and to allow users to instead use Facebook's "Timeline" offering.