- A Bhopal court has issued a summon to Mark Zuckerberg and it will be sent via email
- Additional sessions judge Parth Shankar Mishra was hearing a civil suit filed by Swapnil Rai
- Rai has accused Facebook of mental harassment
The Bhopal district court, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, has issued a summon to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after a city start-up accused the social networking site of harassment. The summon will be sent via email.
Additional sessions judge Parth Shankar Mishra was hearing a civil suit filed by Swapnil Rai, who reportedly runs "thetradebook.org" that he says is a business networking platform. Rai has accused Facebook of stopping his promotional campaign after running it for three days.
The first ad campaign to promote the site ran from August 8 to 14, 2016 and second one was scheduled for April 14 to 21, 2018. "Second campaign was stopped wrongfully on April 16 for which a payment of Rs 215 was raised by Facebook," the Times of India quoted Rai as saying.
"In the second ad-campaign there was promotion of the webpage www.thetradebook.org containing registered trademark 'tradefeed.'"
He also said that Facebook opposed the name of his portal and issued a legal notice asking the word "book" to be removed from the title. Rai also explained that the legal notice from the California-based company has caused him a lot of mental stress.
Rai also said that Facebook has also been pressurizing him to withdraw his application to trademark the name "Tradebook," and a Noida-based firm even sent him a notice on behalf of Facebook on the issue.
"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," TOI quoted the notice as saying.
"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."
