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The Rs 45,000 crore (Rs 450 billion) Tata group is leaving no stone unturned to protect its domain names on the cyberspace.
Tata Sons, the holding company of the group and the owner of the Tata brand, recently won a case against the Pendse family (not related to the former Tata Finance managing director Dilip Pendse) for having registered numerous domain names with Tata as their prefix as well as names of various Tata group companies.
Tata Sons filed a lawsuit in October 2002 against Chitra and Rajesh Pendse, a couple living in the US before the district court of Northern California for cyber-piracy under the US Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999.
Senior Tata Sons sources said, "The suit was concluded recently through a stipulation for permanent injunction against the defendants refraining them permanently from using Tata Sons' trademarks."
The Pendses had domain names--tatasons.net, tatasons.org, tatasons.info, tatasons.biz, tatachemicals.biz, tisco.biz, voltas.biz, tatafinance.biz, tatafinance.info among others.
If one logs onto these domain names, it leads to a webpage of the Pendse family and has Chitra and Rajesh's contact address.
The Tatas has been taking legal action against the misuse of its domain names. Earlier, it had obtained favourable judgement against domain names that included the names of the former chairman and the present chairman of Tata Sons, that is, JRD Tata and Ratan Tata.
It also obtained similar favourable judgements in respect of the domain names tata.org and bodacious-tatas.com.
In one case, Tata Sons had filed arbitration proceedings under the forum of the World Intellectual Property Organisation against an Indian registrant, Ramada Soft, which had registered 10 domain names, namely jrdtata.com, ratantata.com, tatahoneywell.com, tatayodogawa.com, tatateleservices.com, tatassl.com, tatapowerco.com, tatahydro.com, tatawestside.com, tatatimken.com, containing the mark Tata, under the UDRP policy.