The International Herald Tribune writes that “

[w]hen Facebook sued the German leader in social networking, StudiVZ, last month, it contended that the company had illegally copied Facebook’s ‘look and feel’ with similar graphics and features.  ‘A great deal, if not all, of StudiVZ’s success is due to its copying and misusing of Facebook’s intellectual property,’ the Web site said in the complaint, filed last month in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.  What Facebook did not mention, according to a former senior StudiVZ executive, was that the U.S. company had been negotiating for months to try to buy StudiVZ, which is based in a former bakery in the hip Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of eastern Berlin.  ‘Facebook may have the superior technology, but it doesn’t have the users in Germany,’ said this executive, who insisted on anonymity because the talks were confidential.  ‘That is what Facebook wants with StudiVZ.’”

The Washington Post’s Jordan Robertson reports from the Black Hat convention, an information security conference in Las Vegas, writing that “[w]ith thousands of hackers milling around the Black Hat convention here, and widespread snooping on the public WiFi network, one place was supposed to be off limits: the press room.  But in a case of reporters spying on other reporters, three journalists working for the French publication Global Security Magazine were booted Thursday from the hackers’ conference after they were allegedly caught hacking into the private computer network set up for the media.  The French journalists captured what they claimed were usernames and passwords of reporters from at least two media outlets – eWeek and CNET News. The eWeek reporter told organizers his login credentials looked like they were legitimate, while the CNET information appeared to be bogus.”

The Register reports that “[a] £400m outsourcing deal between local authorities and IBM was unfair because the full details of the transfer of staff to a private company were not revealed, [British] workers’ union Unison has said.  It has lodged a claim with an employment tribunal over the deal, which it says led to the local authorities and IBM breaking a Transfer of Undertakings agreement.  The deal, announced in October 2007 as a £400m shared services agreement spanning 10 years, created a new private company to which 1,500 council workers will transfer. It was set up by IBM, Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council and the Avon and Somerset Police Authority. The new company was called Southwest One.  Unison claims that neither it nor staff were given enough details of the outsourcing deal, and that only parts of the deal were revealed to them.”

Internetnews.com today has an article speculating on whether an AOL sale could hurt Google.  According to the publication, “Google’s 5 percent stake in Time Warner’s AOL unit may be worth less than the $1 billion the Web company paid for it in 2006, Google warned in a regulatory filing on Thursday.  ‘We believe our investment in AOL may be impaired,’ Google said in its latest quarterly financial filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  Google said it would continue to review its investment for impairment, and financial write-downs could be required in the future.”

ZDNet has a valuable article on what companies can learn from the Exxon Mobil Internet brand-jacking case.