Court has Summoned Facebook Founder and CEO – Mark Zuckerberg

BHOPAL: An additional session’s judge (ADJ) of Bhopal district court in Madhya Pradesh has summoned Facebookfounder and CEO – Mark Zuckerberg, to his court following a petition by a Bhopal based start-up alleging harassment.

Additional sessions judge Parth Shankar Mishra issued the order with directions to send the summons by email. He was hearing a civil suit filed by Swapnil Rai who runs a portal thetradebook.org, which he claims is a business networking platform.

Rai has alleged that Facebook had stopped his paid advertisement 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 second one was scheduled to be run between April 14 to 21, 2018.

“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 promotion of the webpage www.thetradebook.org containing registered trademark ‘tradefeed’,” he added.

“They want to remove word ‘BOOK’ from my portal and had been sending legal notices to me causing immense mental stress,” Rai adding Facebook had been opposing their trademark application under Class 42 and Class 38 (of the Trademark Filing Classification). Rai also alleged that FACEBOOK was pressurising him to withdraw the trademark application.

On April 2016, a Noida based law firm had issued legal notice of Rai on behalf of Facebook. “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” – reads the notice.

The concerned law firm was contacted for their comment on this issue, but they refused to speak.