As someone who does a lot of work with Intellectual Property, I am amazed that this product name is not protected, and even if it's not (because of the broad applications of the concept), I am disappointed by a company like Microsoft for essentially "stealing" another company's product name and releasing it a few days later. It feel very unclassy and I lost a lot of respect from Microsoft from this announcement.
I'd like to hear everyone else's viewpoint on this. Is Microsoft breaking IP laws here, or is this just something unethical?
Yeah...no. You should know better. If Facebook has trademarked "metaverse", then there would be a problem because consumers could potentially have a problem distinguishing competing virtual realities. Since "metaverse" is from Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash" in the first place, I doubt Facebook or Microsoft has a real "intellectual property" claim on the word in the first place.
My viewpoint is that Microsoft using "metaverse" is a lot like both Kroger and Safeway using "meat". And that you can have physical property, or intellectual property, but not both.
They do have their own products. FB doesn't have an Xbox Cloud, Teams, or Power Platform or Power Apps. Who cares what name it eventually falls under? Let their highly compensated legal teams fight it out.
If FaceBook has an IP case agains't Microsoft here, I think Neal has some prior-art as well.