BHOPAL: Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg has been summoned by an additional session’s judge (ADJ) of Bhopal district court in Madhya Pradesh. A Bhopal based start-up has alleged Zuckerberg for harassment.
While hearing a civil lawsuit filed by Swapnil Rai who runs a business networking platform called thetradebook.org, ADJ Parth Shankar Mishra issued the order with directions to send the summons by email.
Rai has alleged that Facebook had stopped his paid advertising campaign to promote his ‘thetradebook’ page after running it for three days and then issued a legal notice opposing title of his portal. The campaign was run between August 8 to 14 2016 and the second one was scheduled to be run from April 14 to 21, 2018.
“The second campaign was stopped wrongfully on April 16 for which a payment of Rs 215 was raised by Facebook. In the second ad-campaign there was a promotion of the webpage www.thetradebook.org containing registered trademark ‘tradefeed’,” he added.
“Facebook wants to remove word ‘BOOK’ from my portal and had been sending legal notices to me causing immense mental stress” claimed Mr. Rai.
On April 2016, a legal notice was issued to Facebook by a Noida based law firm on behalf of Swapnil Rai.
The notice states that “The trademark FACEBOOK of our client is inherently distinctive and has been used in priority by our client in India. The word FACEBOOK does not exist in common parlance in India prior to the adoption thereof by our client. Our client was the first to use and popularise the term ‘BOOK’ in connection with social networking services. By virtue of its extensive, continues and popular use, our client owns exclusive rights to the trademark FACEBOOK. Moreover, on account of the extensive, worldwide and popular use of the trademark FACEBOOK, no unrelated entity has the right to make use of the identical mark for any goods and services”
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