I’ve just received a Cease & Desist letter for having registering domain names “microstrategy.co.in” and “microstrategy.in”. The reason behind this is

1. Using companies trademark, illegally.
2. Domain names made in bad faith since you are not using domain names for any legitimate purpose.
3. abusive registration of domain names

Pretty much pissed off against MicroStrategy, Inc as I love the company for which I’ve worked (though outsourcer) and I receive this kind of letter.

microstrategy.in directs to microstrategy.co.in which is a MicroSteategy forum.

Can’t comment legally, but I do not use anything that can be trademark violation. Site is fully operational and happening so nothing can be bad taste and I need to know what’s an abusive registration of domain name.

If you have any legal/para-legal advice to let me know.

If they would have had asked politely or tried to contact though common acquaintances, I would have had given to them. But this D&C is torturous. Nothing is illegal on site or site itself is not illegal. I would contest the domain name ownership in Indian court under Indian IT Act 2000.
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Update 9th Feb 6:30 pm IST

Indian IT Act 2000 doesn’t define anything like cybersquatter. Such case can be only fought in court of law or can be settled by Arbitrator of .IN Registry (which still can be challenged in court, extremely tedious and slow process).

One can check the list of domain that were awarded to the Complainant here. I’ve been though most of them and found that the Registrars were indeed cybersqatters and it was pretty easy for rightful owners to get back the domain (this includes monster.in, pizzahut.in, sonyericsson.co.in, gmail.co.in, morganstanley.in, youtube.in, kfc.co.in, franklintempleton.in).

If one reads the case document on the link above, one would come to know that there were people who had simply parked the domain or had opened shell/ad site not hosting anything actually. But I have a strong case and I would be fighting tooth and nail for the hard work I’ve done in setting up the forum and bringing some good people knowing MicroStrategy.