Last week, Facebook announced a rebranding in which they will be officially calling themselves “Meta” from now on. However, keep in mind that this is for Facebook’s parent company, and that the social media platform will continue to be called Facebook and other products like WhatsApp and Instagram will now be a subsidiary of Meta.
That being said, it seems that the name change to Meta could cost the company a pretty penny. This is because it appears that back in August, Zach Shutt filed for the trademark “Meta” for his startup PC company, which had already sold products under the Meta PC brand back in November of 2020.
Facebook, on the other hand, filed for the trademark on the 28th of October, but neither filing has been approved which means that there could be a legal battle over the name. However, according to TMZ, Meta PC’s Schutt and cofounder Joe Darger have suggested that they are willing to stand down if Mark Zuckerberg was willing to pay them $20 million for the name.
Facebook has yet to comment on this issue, so it is unclear how this will proceed. That being said, we have seen various instances of these types of situations in the past, so whether Facebook will just cave in pay $20 million for Meta PC to step down, or fight it out in the court of law remains to be seen.