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.