Blockshopper, a new real estate news site using public housing records, twice posted stories about  lawyers from Jones Day.  The stories detailed home purchases by the lawyers, and linked directly to their biography pages on the firm’s website. The firm repsonded by demanding that the site take down the news items. When Blockshopper refused, Jones Day sued to have the stories taken down on a theory of trademark infringement and dilution. The links, Jones Day argued, diluted the Jones Day brand identity and confused consumers into thinking Jones Day was associated with Blockshopper.

The district court denied a request from the EFF and other organizations to file amicus briefs, and granted an injunction against Blockshopper.  As a result, Blockshopper has decided to settle. The terms of the settlement require that the site now seperate the name and the link. The actual changes required by the settlement are almost irrelevant compared to the bizarre use of a trademark legal theory to control website formatting for something only tangentially related to the legal field.

The highest court in New Zealand recently allowed service of process via Facebook and Email  The defendant, accused of taking over $200,000 from his employer’s account, had since left the country and was thought to be living in England. While his physical location remained unclear, the plaintiff’s counsel showed that his email and Facebook account remained active, and that the money had been accessed via the Internet as well. Taking inspiration from a similar Australian case where a couple was noticed of home foreclosure via digital service, the court allowed a secondary service order to be sent. For its part, Facebook has been positive about this newfound functionality, saying it shows “Facebook as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication.”

A trio of thieves broke into a Berlin luxury department store, sliding down the skylight on a cable and escaping with watches and jewels worth over 6.5 million dollars. The masked men were picked up on security cameras, but the only piece of evidence linking a specific thief to the scene was a discarded rubber glove found at the scene- and specifically, the DNA evidence left inside the glove. Unfortunately, the evidence is nowunusable in German court, due to a twist:  two of the suspects are twins. Being identical twins to a point utterly indistinguishable by modern DNA tests, there is no way of conclusively showing who wore the glove. In German criminal law, each case against a criminal must be proved specifically and separately. The investigation continues, but at the current point, with no evidence of the stolen goods or of the third participant in the crime, the two are currently free of police custody.

In China, sale of counterfeit gift cards to Apple’s iTunes digital media service have grown significantly over the last six months. The “cards” are just a code, which cracks the formula used by Apple to generate the large alphanumeric string that is typed into an account to redeem it for credit. The cards are currently on sale for as little as $2.60 US for a card worth $200 of products on iTunes. Apple’s problem is twofold, due to the nature of the iTunes system. Apple can’t simply pull the plug and invalidate the counterfeit codes without potentially invalidating an unknown number of actual gift cards- many of which may have already been solid legitimately. Apple also faces hight potential cost of licensing fees for the downloads made using these counterfeit cards, for which Apple receives no revenue.

Gene Quinn of IP Watchdog reports on dramatic disagreements during today’s Judiciary Committee Executive Meeting concerning patent reform legislation, including Senator Hatch leaving the room in a huff. 

Once again, Google launches an astonishing new feature in time for April 1.  What will they think of next?

Legislation recently proposed in the U.S. Senate would create a sweeping federal cybersecurity regime.  This would include federal security standards for private enterprise as well as a new White House cybersecurity czar’s office with authority to shut down private computer networks. 

This proposal obviously raises a host of intellectual property and privacy issues.  It’s also unclear how the U.S. cybersecurity czar’s office would interface with global Internet governance infrastructure.

The highest court in Maryland recently handed down a decision in Independent Newspapers, Inc. v. Zebulon J. Brodie, in which the owner of a local Dunkin’ Donuts franchise filed defamation action against a trio of anonymous posters about the cleanliness of a local franchise location.   The Court overturned a previous court order to hand over the identifications based on 1st Amendment grounds. Most notably, they cited to the New Jersey case of Dendrite International, Inc. v. John Doe No. 3, as the standard for handling discovery concerning anonymous posters on the Internet in defamation actions.

The Dendrite standard was applied, more or less unmodified, by the Maryland court.  In an anonymous defamation action, the Maryland court ruled that the plaintiff would first have to try to notify the posters that they are being supoenaed, through a post on the message board or other means. The plaintiff would then have to allow the anonymous posters time to file opposition motions or a demand that the plaintiff to identify the exact posters and specific posts that were the alleged cause of action. Lastly, the plaintiff would have to establish a prima facie case of defamation, and satisfy a balancing test weighing the poster’s first amendment rights against the strength of the case and the need for disclosure.  This is a rather protective standard that is good news for anonymous forum commenters.

Amazon has produced a new model of its popular Kindle E-book reader, called the Kindle 2, which is designed to be more portable and convenient than the previous model. The Kindle 2 also includes a number of new features, including nationwide wireless internet for instant content delivery. However, the most controversial of these new features is a text-to-speech software based audio reader. The feature uses standard text-to-speech software to read any of the content on the Kindle out loud. The controversy arises from the Author’s Guild assertion that this violates the rights of the authors to produce audiobooks as a derivative work. An Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (Reg Required) by Roy Blount Jr., Author’s Guild president, asserted that this was effectively sniping the more valuable audiobook rights by forcibly bundling them in with the weaker E-book rights.

In response, Amazon has chosen to stand down on the issue rather than raise a controversy. While Amazon claims that the “experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given”, and that it will “grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business”, it now includes a software flag in the Kindle-format E-books that allow a publisher to determine whether the text-to-speech reading function will be enabled.  Amazon could face difficult consumer relations questions if customers are unable to determine easily whether a prospective e-book purchase includes the text-to-speech feature.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who has made reducing copyright infringement a major political priority for France and the EU, has been sued by American band MGMT for infringing use of one of its songs. Sarkozy’s most notable copyright proposal is a “Three Strikes” rule for file sharing which would ultimately result in denial of Internet access to persistent infringers.  Sarkozy allegedly violted the terms of a license agreement to use MGMT’s music.  Sarkozy is said to have offered a symbolic 1 Euro settlement payment, which the band’s lawyers have refused, calling it “insulting.”