The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

BeltLine Facebook group relaunched under new name

Trademark kerfuffle leads to ‘Humans of Atlanta Heartline.’

- By Nedra Rhone nrhone@ajc.com

The Atlanta woman who was told to stop using the trademark of the Atlanta BeltLine in the name of her public Facebook group, has relaunched the page under a new name.

Humans of the Atlanta HeartLine, remains what Jessie Fream calls a “Humans of New York wannabe” featuring interviews and photos of people on the Atlanta BeltLine, and ends a six month standoff with Atlanta BeltLine Inc. (ABI) the entity charged with overseeing the BeltLine vision.

Last fall, officials from ABI contacted Fream on Facebook asking her to stop using “BeltLine” in the title of her group.” Fream had launched “Humans of the Atlanta BeltLine” a year prior to receiving the communicat­ion from ABI, as a hobby. She intended it to be a love letter to the city’s most ambitious revitaliza­tion efforts.

But ABI saw it as trademark infringeme­nt, along with hundreds of other individual­s who have registered unauthoriz­ed domains and businesses using the BeltLine name.

Ericka Davis, spokeswoma­n for ABI said at the time, they simply wanted to notify Fream that the BeltLine has policies governing the use of the name and that were happy to have discussion­s with Fream to come up with a solution.

Over the past year, the number of individual­s and organizati­ons using the BeltLine name without permission has grown, Davis said, despite a link on the website directing individual­s to contact ABI to licensing of the name.

Fream launched the newly named page this month with several posts from Easter weekend. Her previous page, which had more than 2,000 followers, is now inactive.

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