Meta buying trademark rights

Facebook is dead serious about the metaverse, and it moves forward it in its signature “I am the biggest one here” style.

It has recently become known that Facebook (or rather its new entity Meta Platforms Inc.) bought the trademark rights for “Meta Financial” name from a South Dakota bank for a whopping $60M.

According to the law, the assignment-in-gross (in the absence of a demonstrable, genuine intent to continue the identity and meaning of the assigned trademark) is prohibited. This means that either Facebook’s new Meta business is going to get a new monetization model, or the company lawyers have found a plausible excuse to acquire the broadest possible rights for all things meta.

This is not the first time Meta’s obsession with the word has transpired into the press. In November, just 5 days after the Facebook rebranding, an Australian artist saw her Instagram @metaverse account containing 10 years of work deactivated. Just like this. The incident not only raised indignation with centralized social media all-mightiness, but also rang the alarm bell concerning Meta’s plans and how exactly the company is going to realize them.

A month after, with media all around the world relaying the @metaverse issue, Instagram restored the account, saying that an “error” has occurred, leading it to be wrongly removed for “impersonation”. Really? ?

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta move forward very quickly, and we would very much like to repeat Keanu Reeves’ words:

“Can we just not have metaverse be invented by Facebook? The concept of metaverse is way older than that.“

Totally agreed, Keanu. The metaverse must be decentralized.