John Doe is the most common nobody. No, I’m not kidding. He is actually a nobody. But he is also very common. All right, I’m sorry! Let me ease things for you.
In numerous legal cases, there isn’t always a defined entity or person involved in a case. The identity of one of the parties to the case, many times, remains unavailable. In such cases, that party is termed or described as John Doe. Now, did you know what Indians call their John Doe when faced with similar circumstances? The recent case will make it clear.
The Delhi recently encountered a case involving several rounds of trademark as well as domain name infringement on the Plaintiff Dabur. Dabur is a well known brand in India with a pivotal presence in the Indian market for over 150 years now. However, many of the domain names relating to her are registered trying to extract unethical benefits.
The domain names in question here were DaburDistributor.com and DaburFranchisee.in. DaburDistributor.com was particularly trying to impersonate, infringe, copy and create a replica of DaburDistributorships.in. However, the problem was that there was no identification of the registrants as their identity was Privacy Protected.
In such a situation, the court coined the party as Ashok Kumar. Yes, this is what the Indian counterpart of John Doe is called. Ashok Kumar!
The domain names were clearly registered to masquerade as authentic Dabur Distributors and extract money in the process. The Court stopped the functioning of these domain names. It also barred the registrants from further infringing upon any of Dabur’s related trademarks. Both of the domain names in questions are now unavailable.
Join the Discussion