META Vietnam has issued a statement regarding Facebook's name change to Meta.
As speculated last week, Facebook officially announced this week that it is changing its company name to Meta. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta will usher in a new chapter in Facebook's history.
- Facebook changed its name to Meta.
In fact, just like Google did when it established its parent company Alphabet, Facebook only changed the name of the managing company while the products retained their original names. Meta will own and manage Facebook's current products and services, such as the Facebook social network, Instagram, and messaging applications like Messenger and WhatsApp.
However, in Vietnam, there is already a company called META. The full name of META in Vietnam is META Online Network Joint Stock Company, which was granted Business Registration Certificate No. 0102196915 by the Hanoi Department of Planning and Investment on March 29, 2007. Therefore, META also holds the intellectual property rights to the META brand and domain names in Vietnam such as META.vn and META.com.vn.
META Online Network Joint Stock Company operates in the field of e-commerce, aiming to provide customers with excellent products and reliable online shopping services. It is also one of the pioneering companies in the e-commerce sector in Vietnam since 2007.
In addition to e-commerce, META Online Network Joint Stock Company also owns a number of other large websites such as TipsMake.com , Gamevui.com , VnDoc.com, Download.vn, and Hoatieu.vn.
In response to questions about whether Facebook would operate in Vietnam under the new brand Meta, META's media representative, Ms. Bui Thi Bich Thuy, stated:
"We were surprised to learn that Facebook has changed its name to Meta, which is the same as the META brand we own. This raises potential concerns about potential brand and service confusion between the two companies."
Currently, we cannot confirm whether Facebook is legally registered and operating in Vietnam under the Meta brand. We affirm that META has been operating in Vietnam for nearly 15 years and has a reputable presence in the e-commerce and media sectors.
We possess all necessary legal documents, including a business registration certificate, a META trademark registration certificate, a social media license, and ownership of domain names in Vietnam. In the future, if Facebook intends to operate in Vietnam under the Meta brand, we will take legal measures to protect our brand.
We believe that a large company like Facebook will take copyright and legal issues very seriously when operating in Vietnam, to avoid unnecessary conflicts of rights and interests between the two companies.
Speaking to Thanh Nien newspaper, Mr. Giang Van Quyet - Director of I Love Law Co., Ltd. - Hanoi Bar Association, said that because the company has registered its business name (trade name) as META Online Network Joint Stock Company, the company name is not just META but includes all the components of the business type as 'Joint Stock Company' and the specific name 'META Online Network'.
For this trade name, the company has been automatically protected without registration based on Clause 3, Article 6 of Decree 103/2006/ND-CP: 'Industrial property rights for trade names are established on the basis of the lawful use of that trade name corresponding to the area (territory) and business field without the need to carry out registration procedures'.
Furthermore, since the company was registered in 2007, according to Article 41 of the Enterprise Law, the establishment or renaming of another company with a name that is identical to or confusingly similar to the company's name will not be permitted. Therefore, even if Facebook changes its name to Meta, it cannot use a name that is identical to or confusingly similar to the current company name in Vietnam, and it will not affect the existing company name, Mr. Van Quyet added.
