Facebook has been one of the most aggressive entities out there with regard to their trademarks. Most recently Facebook has filed to trademark the word âFace.â

I must admit, when I first saw this, I laughed a bit to myself, for several reasons. 1) this is a common word that if a trademark were to be granted, it would have to be under a variety of restrictions; 2) Facebook is not the first company in the telecommunications industry to use the word âFaceâ in its name. That being said, it is likely that on some level, Facebook will succeed in having the word trademarked for protection within their sphere.

However, this is likely all they want. A trademark may help Facebook throw the book (no pun intended) at the competition -- and Facebook faces (also no pun intended) a wealth of it. GoDaddy.com, the world's largest domain name registrar, has 53,000 domain names containing the word "face" in its databases. The company also estimated that the Internet has 89,000 domain names containing the word "face" just in the .com world.

A trademark can cover a variety of things, from a name to a slogan, a jingle, logo, or even color (for example, the facebook blue). In Facebook's case, the trademark would cover "telecommunication services,...