Should trademark owners protect themselves on PING? After examining the pro’s and con’s, TM.Biz advises that certain trademark owners should protect themselves on PING now.
PING is Apple’s new social network. Accessible from iTunes, it has a built-in audience of over 160 million users. To activate PING, iTunes users need to upgrade to version 10. Over one million users upgraded and activated their PING account in the first 48 hours. Many of these users are creating profiles for their favorite artists.
Currently, PING is being called “half-baked” by critics due to a limited feature set. But this will change as Apple has ambitions that extend beyond music to include movies, television and other forms of entertainment.
PING works a bit like Twitter, allowing users to post short messages about the music they enjoy and connect and follow other users. Unlike twitter, the public profiles for PING do not have user-friendly URL’s. Instead they are cyptic anonymous URL’s. PING does support a special Artist profile that currently has limited use and is available by invite-only. There are currently only a few Artist profiles from mainstream acts such as Lady Gaga and The Dave Matthews Band.
The PING internal search engine allows you to search for a user’s public profile by entering their first or last name. Since Apply has not yet established an automated process for who can get an Artist profile, many musicians and bands are scrambling to promote themselves by force-fitting their brand into the firstname-lastname naming convention.
Unfortunately, fans can use this feature as well. And since profiles are not unique, duplicates are popping up all over. There are already user profiles called “The Beatles Page”, “The Rolling Stones”, three user profiles called “Green Day” and six for “Miley Cyrus”.
However, TM.Biz predicts that Apple, or some third party, will quickly introduce vanity-based PING Usernames that are easily indexed by search engines. It will then be open season for cybersquatters.
TM.Biz recommends that the following types of trademark owners protect themselves on PING by establishing a standard user profile:
1. Obviously, any musicial act or brand
2. Famous celebrities in the entertainment industry
3. Well-known business executives
4. Famous trademarks in movies and television, which is the most probable future markets for PING.
TM.Biz is a new service that helps protect trademarks on social media. Eligibility is restricted to trademark lawyers and brand managers. For more information, see www.tm.biz.
