SAO PAULO (Reuters) – A São Paulo court has ordered Facebook’s parent company Meta to stop using its name in Brazil within 30 days, saying a local computer service provider with the same name had been harmed by a third party. commanded. companies.
The decision was made on Wednesday and was reported by Brazilian newspaper Valor late Thursday evening.
Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mark Zuckerberg’s technology company can appeal the decision.
Barueri-based Meta Serbicos, which registered its brand with Brazil’s National Institute of Intellectual Property in the late 2000s, has been wrongly accused of more than 100 lawsuits since Zuckerberg’s company changed its name in 2021. It was stated in the judicial proceedings that it had been included in the I deactivated my Instagram profile because I was pretending to be someone else.
The São Paulo appeals court ruled that US Meta must pay 100,000 reais ($20,201) for each day it does not comply with the decision.
The company, formerly known as Facebook, changed its name in a rebrand focused on building a “metaverse,” a shared virtual environment that it believes will be the successor to the mobile internet.
(1 dollar = 4.9503 reais)
(Reporting by Alberto Alerisi Jr. and Patricia Villas-Boas in São Paulo; Additional reporting and writing by Andre Romani; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
