Bhopal court summons FB chief over ‘harassment’

Bhopal: A local court here has issued summons to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg following a petition filed by a start-up here alleging harassment to him by the social media networking site.

Additional session’s judge (Bhopal) Partha Shankar Mishra has issued a direction to summon the Facebook founder and CEO through email to be present in the court, in response to the petition filed by one Swapnil Ray who runs a portal thetradebook.org, which, according to him, is a business networking platform.

Mr Rai told the media that the Facebook stopped his paid advertisement campaign to promote his portal after running for three days and then slapped a legal notice objecting to the title of his portal.

The campaign was run in Facebook between August eight to 14, 2016 and was scheduled to resume between April 14-21,2018. Facebook sought removal of the word “Book” in my portal and had been sending legal notices leading to my mental stress, he said.

Facebook has purportedly sent him a legal notice through a Noida-based law firm, saying, “The trademark Face-book 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,” the purported legal notice issued by Facebook said.