It’s the sort of thing that was inevitable — two companies of the same name want a Facebook page. Administrative wires got crossed and hey, presto, we have a 21st century legal dispute to resolve.

In this case, Merck KGAa, based in Darmstadt, Germany, filed a request for Facebook page www.facebook.com/merck in March 2010, according to a petition filed with the Supreme Court of New York, available here. Merck & Co. (NYSE:MRK) in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey also has a Facebook page. According to the petition, German Merck checked its account on Oct. 11 only to discover it no longer had administrative rights to the web page. After trying unsuccessfully to get the matter resolved, according to the petition, Robert B.G. Horowitz of Baker & Hostetler in New York City took legal action.

Just to ease the confusion, pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. and chemistry, biotechnology and pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA are unrelated entities. Merck & Co came about following the end of World War I through a provision in the Treaty of Versailles. Each owns exclusive rights to the Merck trademark in different geographical areas.

A spokesman for Merck & Co, said this is all a “tempest in a teacup.” Facebook shut down its vanity web page, the spokesman said, but that’s simply a shorter url than its original web page, which is still active.  “Nothing is going to change” on its Facebook page, the spokesman said.

He added: “At this point, we are still evaluating how this happened and we are considering our options.”

For its part, Facebook’s PR shifted into gear a lot faster than the company’s administration, which took more than one month to address the issue. A spokesman for Facebook said it has apologized to Merck KGAa and blamed the dispute on an administrative error — a response, I might add, I received so fast that it either says more about Facebook’s whiplash fast flacks, or the desire to remove itself from the unwelcome prospect of a legal battle with Big Pharma. The company said in an email:

“The transfer of the vanity URL Facebook.com/Merck from Merck KGAa to Merck
& Co. was due to an administrative error. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

One lawyer observed that it is an intellectual property issue and because trademarks are geographic, two different companies can own the same brand in two different places. But the Internet and social media in particular in this case has blurred those geographic divisions and made it easier for companies to bump into each other in ways that were impossible in previous eras.

I’m betting that this is neither the only time this has happened, nor will it be the last time. Hopefully when Facebook gets rid of the egg from its face, it will work out a system for addressing these issues in a more timely fashion.