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Protecting Your Trademark on Facebook

Client Alert | 1 min read | 06.11.09

Facebook®, the popular social networking system, has announced that starting at 12:01 a.m. (EDT) on Saturday, June 13, 2009, its users will be allowed to create personalized URLs. (see http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130). This raises the possibility that some Facebook users may try to incorporate third party trademarks as part of their new URLs.

In anticipation of this possibility, Facebook has established an online form to be used by trademark owners interested in protecting their trademarks from being registered as usernames. (Click here: Facebook - Preventing the Registration of a Username). The online form is simple and, barring technical complications, should be easy to use. It is unknown as to how effective this system will turn out to be but there may be be little downside to the process. Unfortunately, Facebook has given minimal advance notice of this new development and trademark owners who wish to take full advantage of this system should consider submitting the online form prior to the commencement of the new URL registration program on Saturday June 13.

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Client Alert | 2 min read | 09.22.25

Department of Education Discontinues Discretionary Grant Funding for Minority-Serving Institutions

The Department of Education (DOE) announced on September 10, 2025, that it will end discretionary funding to several Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) grant programs that, it stated, “discriminate by conferring government benefits exclusively to institutions that meet racial or ethnic quotas.”[1] The agency stated that it would “us[e] its statutory authority to reprogram discretionary funds to programs that do not present such concerns.”[2] This announcement follows a July 2025 decision by the Department of Justice to no longer defend the constitutionality of a provision of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) that authorizes grant funding to Hispanic-Serving institutions, after determining that such programs “violate the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.”[3]...

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