Facebook has won a hefty court ruling in China preventing another firm calling a drink 'face book’. You couldn’t make this up.

The Beijing Higher People's Court found that Chinese firm Zhongshan Pearl River Drinks violated Facebook’s trademarked name, ruling that the company’s trademark registration was an “obvious copy, intentionally copied from another high-profile trademark”.

As a result, the Chinese company will have its trademark registration revoked. So no drinks named after social media sites, and we were so looking forward to Twitter tea, LinkedIn lemonade, Instagram Irn-Bru, Pintrest Pimms and Google+ water.

Luckily for Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, his company seems to have a growing influence in China, which is known to be notoriously difficult towards Western companies in disputes with native firms.

As if dealing with government requests for data is not enough, Facebook is blocked in China by the Great Chinese Firewall. This put a potential audience of a billion people beyond Facebook’s grasp, which is surely quite frustrating for its management.

But here’s where the conjecture engine really starts revving. The court’s ruling in Facebook’s favour could mean that the company’s name is having some bearing on the Chinese market. As such, savvy speculators would not be raving lunatics to suggest that this could be a bit of a pre-amble for Facebook being allowed into China.

This would be a pretty big move given that China’s pseudo-communist government is not too keen on digital services that allow citizens to mouth-off on a platform visible to over a billion people beyond the nation’s borders.

People wanting to use Facebook in China, including a friend of The INQUIRER's, have to use proxy servers and VPNs to bypass the firewall.

Zuckerberg has also been quite active in courting China’s favour, having very publicly taken a morning run through Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, despite the area being thick with pollution. *Ahem* media stunt *ahem*.