Groupon India, the Indian operations of the global group buying service, which used to operate under the Crazeal brand name, till it recently rebranded itself to Groupon India and switched to a new domain – Groupon.co.in, has won the case related to the copyright and usage of the brand name, Groupon India, in the country. However, there's another case related to the ownership of the Groupon.in domain, for which a hearing is still due. Groupon CEO, Ankur Warikoo informed MediaNama that ValueNet Ecommerce still holds the copyright for the Groupon.in domain name. Note that Bangalore based company, ValueNet Ecommerce, had started a daily deals site Groupon.in, and more interestingly, trademarked the brand name Groupon, in India. So Groupon was not able to get its hands on the ‘groupon.in’ domain. However, it managed to get an ex parte ad interim injunction from the Delhi High Court, which restrained the usage of the trademark GROUPON or a variation of it. Subsequently, the defendent (Mohan Rao) initiated litigation against Groupon Inc in the district court in Bangalore, following which the Delhi High Court initiated mediation at the Delhi High Court Mediation and Conciliation Centre. So Groupon and the owners of the trademark Groupon in India (and groupon.in) are in the midst of a court case: the next hearing of the case in the Delhi High Court is on 21st January 2013. - On traffic trends - Warikko said that it was too early to comment on traffic, and that Crazeal has a lot of SEO which is still not transferred to the…
