St Louis Manager Tony La Russa has sued Twitter in Superior court in San Francisco over a fake La Russa Twitter account. Text of La Russa complaint here; Citizen Media summary of case here, coverage here. One account reported that La Russa sued after Twitter failed to respond to attempts to contact it.

From a WSJ interview between Walt Mossberg and Twitter CEO Evan Williams and co-founder Biz Stone. Mossberg had asked Williams about whether commercial accounts on Twitter would be a good idea.

MR. WILLIAMS: The theory is this: There is a lot of commercial usage on Twitter today. There are lots of big brands on Twitter, using it as a marketing, communications and customer-support vehicle. There are small businesses using it to just connect with their customers and build relationships.
It seems like we can maybe offer them things to do that more powerfully and more efficiently, and things that don’t interfere with and actually benefit consumer users.
MR. MOSSBERG: Give me one or two examples.
MR. WILLIAMS: People are fans of Dunkin’ Donuts. They have a relationship with the company, they go there every day. Dunkin’ Donuts is using Twitter to communicate with those people. There are people who are finding value in that. There’s thousands of people, I don’t know how many thousands now, following Dunkin’ Donuts.
So if that’s the case, if you are a new user to Twitter and you stumble across Dunkin’ Donuts, the first thing you want to know, is this really Dunkin’ Donuts? If you’re Dunkin’ Donuts and you have a brand to protect, you want to look legit, and you want to make sure no one else is trying to interfere with your brand.
MR. MOSSBERG:Like a Starbucks pretending to be Dunkin’ Donuts. So the first thing is you have some way for Dunkin’ Donuts to establish it’s really them?
MR. WILLIAMS: A service we could offer as the middleman.
MR. MOSSBERG: Some sort of authentication.
MR. WILLIAMS: Say yes, this is Dunkin’ Donuts. We check them out. It’s something that will take us manual effort to do and a little time, so we’ll probably want to charge money for that.

Now, to be fair, this is a hypothetical conversation about a hypothetical service so we’re just talking here. Having said that, my immediate reaction was kneejerk – Twitter proposes to charge Dunkin’ Donuts so that it’s not confused with the x number of Twitter users who are infringing Dunkin’ Donuts? What nerve! How about instead, Twitter merely does not commit contributory infringement by not allowing x number of users to infringe Dunkin’ Donuts.
But there’s another way of looking at it. There can be the universal not-necessarily commercial, unregulated, unzoned Twitterverse, where the Twitter name EXAMPLE does not imply that it is the sole source of EXAMPLE goods and services (just as the gmail address EXAMPLE@GMAIL.COM has little impied authenticity; and inside the universal unregulated Twitterverse is the commercial regulated zoned Twitterverse, where the Twitter name EXAMPLE does function as a trademark. And it seems plausible to charge for maintaining that commercial zone.

43(B)log: “Doubled Denied, denied in part“:

Simon-Whelan v. Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2009 WL 1457177 (S.D.N.Y.)
Simon-Whelan, as putative class representative for art buyers, alleged that the Foundation and various defendants violated state and federal antitrust laws by conspiring to restrain and monopolize trade in the market for Warhol works. He also alleged individual unjust enrichment, Lanham Act, and fraud claims. The Lanham Act claim was based on the defendants’ denial of the authenticity of a work he owned, and the fraud claim was based on allegations that he was fraudulently induced to submit his artwork to the defendants’ authentication board and sign a convenant not to sue in connection with such submissions.

InsideFacebook.com: “Will Facebook Give Away Vanity URLs in a Landrush?“:

Under such a system, users would be able to get URLs like facebook.com/mark for their own personal profiles. (However, some of the most common first names are already taken.)
Administering such a landrush would be a significant challenge. Presumably, Facebook wouldn’t let users register trademarked terms or generic words like “lasvegashotels” that could be used to simply generate spammy SEO traffic. Facebook would have to establish clear rules for how the vanity URLs would be distributed.

clean perfume.jpg

From the complaint: Each of plaintiff’s CLEAN products and marketing materials bear inherently distinctive designs and/or such design have acquired distinctivenss wherein the word “CLEAN” appears large and starkly on the labeling with larger than appropriate spacing between each letter of CLEAN. (para. 11). Defendants are selling a line of fragrance and skin care products bearing the name KLEAN that also seems to copy the trade dress. Para 14.
Complaint Clean Klean