As most people know by now, except the employees at Facebook, the 18 Karat Reggae Facebook page has been hacked, stolen and taken over by some unscrupulous characters.  There are certain things that we observed since the hacking that lead us to believe that Facebook employee(s) are actually behind the hacking but that’s a different story.

Since the hacking we have tried daily to gain back our page with no luck.  Since we don’t want the thieves posting things that could damage our brand we decided to file a trademark violation complaint with Facebook as we own the trademark for 18 Karat Reggae.

To our surprise and disbelief, we got the following response from Facebook:

Hi,

Thanks for your report. Based on the trademark information you provided, it looks like you’re claiming trademark rights in the United States while the reported content appears to be directed at Jamaica. For this reason, it’s not clear that the reported content infringes your trademark rights.

If you have trademark rights in Jamaica, you may reply to this email with more information and we can look into the matter further.

Thanks,

Orlando
Intellectual Property Operations
Facebook

Whatever Facebook means when they say the content seems to be directed at Jamaica is beyond me.  Do they not know that there are many reggae fans living in America?  Do they not know that there are many Americans who are reggae fans?  In fact, the United States with a population of 320 million has way more reggae fans than Jamaican with a population of 3 million people.

It is said that Facebook hires the brightest people to work for them, so I can’t imagine that Facebook gave any employees that could be this stupid.  Then again, if someone had told me that Facebook employees were providing scammers with the necessary information to hack and steal popular pages, I would not have believed it but I have seen strong proof of that in recent days.  Maybe Facebook’s leadership just doesn’t empower their employees so they are left with rigid rules to follow and cannot exercise their discretion.

Whatever it is, it will take me a while to live down the fact that the following was said about a Reggae page on Facebook:  it looks like you’re claiming trademark rights in the United States while the reported content appears to be directed at Jamaica.

Since the main 18 Karat Reggae page got hacked and stolen, we have been posting on another page we named 18karatregge.com.  Please like and follow the new page to keep up with all the happenings in reggae, not only in Jamaica but around the entire world.