He spends his time selling different kinds of meats, and one of the better markets for Bill Flentje is Denver Urban Homesteading, a year-round, indoor farmers market downtown.
The market’s Facebook page was key for getting the word out, Flentje said.
But the page doesn’t exist anymore.
A California group, it turns out, owns a trademark on the term “urban homesteading.” It asked Facebook to remove the page — and other pages using the term — and Facebook complied.
“It’s kind of a wacky deal,” said Flentje. “It’s somebody trying to grab a universal term after it’s already out of the box.”
The “takedown request” — or plea to remove a Facebook page — by the Dervaes Institute, a nonprofit that grew up around a family of ambitious urban homesteaders in Pasadena, has provoked a flood of angry activism from people around the country who use the term “urban homesteading.”
Urban homesteaders are city dwellers who turn their yards into miniature farms, complete with elaborate gardens, fruit trees, bees and chickens. It has become a full-fledged movement, with books, publications and groups that meet in cities across the country to swap tips about canning, curing meats, raising rabbits for meat, and more.
“Once the Internet community and the homesteading community found out about this they became as mad as wet hens,” said James Bertini, the owner of Denver Urban Homesteading. Bertini has been one of the leaders in the movement against the Dervaes Institute. He recently raised money to petition the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the trademark.
“We can’t communicate with our customers. We can’t tell them about specials. We can’t tell them about a new vendor with a great product.”
The Dervaes Institute did not respond to queries from The Denver Post about the matter.
Bertini said the page had more than 2,000 Facebook users who used it to follow the goings-on at the market. Most of those contacts now are lost, he said. His business has its own website (denverurbanhomesteading .com), but it lacks the community that formed around his Facebook page. And it doesn’t harbor those contacts that vanished when his Facebook page evaporated.
People angry about the yanking of “urban homesteading” Facebook pages started a Facebook page called “Take Back Urban Home-steading(s).” Nearly 7,000 Facebook users have endorsed the page’s message, which seeks to return the term to the public domain.
If the Dervaes Institute tried to prevent people from using the term outside of an online service provider like Facebook, a judge would toss the lawsuit, said Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, a digital rights advocacy and legal nonprofit.
“The claims are legally absurd,” she said. “We don’t want a world where trademarks lock up language.”
But with Facebook and other sites, things are murkier.
“Service providers don’t have great incentive to push back when they get a trademark complaint,” she said. “They see it is registered and their view is, ‘OK, work it out amongst yourselves and let us know.’ “
The reason: money. It likely would cost service providers more in legal fees to wrestle with trademark disputes than is worth their while, McSherry said.
Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.
McSherry is representing some of the targets of the “urban homesteading” Facebook banishments. She said the problem isn’t isolated to “urban homesteading,” though. Many people and groups have taken a hit from takedown requests that are based on tenuous grounds.
“A takedown request can have a serious impact on people,” she said. “It’s worrisome that something as small as an e-mail can have such a serious consequence.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
