Please tell me that Iām not the only one who will refuse to call facebook āmetaā.
I literally live in fandom spaces, if I search āmetaā somewhere and facebook appears first Iām going to personally go kick zuckerbergās ass.
Okay okay but hereās the thing.
MetaCompany put out a PUBLIC CEASE AND DESIST.
So i googled this letter and found it very suspect
That letter is from https://meta.company/ and, if you visit it, youāll notice the site has almost nothing on it. Just the letter and three links to social media sites
The linked sites, which are twitter, facebook, and instagram, all had their accounts created around November 1, 2021, after Facebook announced their rebrand. Each account has a single post publicizing the letter
The social media accountsā usernames are ātherealmetacompanyā rather than something more professional as you would expect from an official company account
It is unclear what MetaCompany does
It is unclear whether MetaCompany existed before now. When searching for companies named Meta I found Meta, which was foreclosed in 2019, Meta, which was bought out and shut down by Zuckerburg, and a couple other companies that are still active but have no link to the letter.
A trademark for METACOMPANY was submitted in 2016, but there is nothing linking it to the letter.
http://web.archive.org/ has a history of the website, which contains only a 404 error from 2018, and the letter from November 1.
The letter written with inflammatory language, like it was designed to attract peopleās anger rather than call attention to a problem.
TL;DR MetaCompany is very likely a hoax
HOWEVER, there is also another company called Meta PCs that is claiming copyright infringement, and it is much more obvious that they are real.
Facebook's plan to rebrand to Meta may cost the social network $20 million, with the founders of Meta PC telling the company that they're wi
Absence of evidence isnāt evidence of absence. None of this stuff is particularly unusual for a company that has been trying to get started but wasnāt ready to reveal itself to the public yet, and if you dig a bit deeper thereās some strong evidence that theyāre legit
First of all, the Internet Archive may have only archived their site once (not surprising for a site that wasnāt yet in use), but a whois search confirms that the domain has existed since 2014
If you do a google search restricted to results from prior to the meta announcement, youāll find there is definitely a real person named Nate Skulic (the name at the bottom of the letter) who is a programmer that lives in Chicago (the location at the bottom of the letter) and absolutely existed prior to last month (1, 2, 3). Must be a very private man to have so few results, but thatās his own business - those are definitely real
And most importantly, there is information linking the 2016 trademark listing they posted to meta.company. Looking through the documents tab,Ā here is a screenshot (or mockup, maybe?) of the site meta.company, andĀ here is a page stating that the owner of the trademark is located at 7056 N Monon Ave, Chicago, IL - the home of a man named Nate Skulic
While doing this research, I found a lot of sentiments around the internet that meta.company is a hoax just because they came forward before they were ready (as they said) in response to facebookās bullshit, so if you could share this post - or at least this information - it could help back them up
And, if you must know, it looks from the trademark documents that they doĀ corporate software development
Okay, I do shit like this for a living, so Iām going to build a bit on the great points and searches @time-traveling-fetusā and @hater-of-terfsā have already made and done and maybe give you all some idea of how to approach the question of āis this company legit?ā or something adjacent if it comes up in the future. With the significant caveat that a lot of this kind of research is far easier for the US than it is for most other countries because the US has a lot more court and corporate information freely and publicly available online, and also has significantly laxer privacy laws.
Letās start with USPTO, which has already been mentioned. Great shit. Always a good start for a trademark matter, and useful even if youāre not dealing with a trademark matter, if you need figure out the legal entity, or the exact name/other information that would be easier to find with the exact name of a legal entity, behind a brand or something. Most countries will have a similar website. Canadaās can be found here. The EUās is here (and helpfully includes non-EU items in its results). Japanās is here (website has an English version. If Iām recalling correctly, the English website isnāt as complete as the Japanese, but trust me, you can get very far with Google translate). You could even go straight to WIPO for a nice international collection.
As has been indicated, indeed, there is a live trademark for āmetacompanyā registered in the US. Its page indicates the application was filed in 2016 and, crucially, it tells us the owner of the trademark is a company called āMeta LLCā. This is relevant, because, if we are to assume the company associated with the MetaCompany website is the same as the one that owns this trademark, āMeta LLCā is what we are now looking for. We can pretty safely assume that, by the way, because at the very bottom of the MetaCompany website we can see this:
[Image Description: A screenshot of the very bottom of the website https://meta.company/ that says āCopyrightĀ Ā© 2021 Meta, LLC.ā End Image Description]
The trademark page also gives the companyās state as Illinois. Excellent. Now we know where weāre going next. Namely, the Illinois corporate registry, which contains basic info on all the companies incorporated in Illinois. Not all corporate registries are public, and not all of them are freely accessible. In the US, they tend to be, though. Illinoisās can be found here under the Office of the Illinois Secretary of State.
Oh rad, weāve got results (which I am going to throw under a cut along with the rest of this because this post is long enough as is):
Keep reading
