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Fluffeh writes:
A recent article by The Intercept showed how US and UK intelligence agencies have been impersonating the servers of companies like Facebook. In November, Der Spiegel noted that agencies created "bogus versions" of sites like Slashdot and LinkedIn to plant malware in targets' machines.
Copyright claims brought against the government must be filed in the US Court of Federal Claims, and the subject matter in question must have previously been registered with the Copyright Office-something companies don't typically do for their Web interfaces.
In contrast, under the Lanham Act, the government is expressly liable. The law clearly states, "As used in this paragraph, the term 'any person' includes the United States, all agencies and instrumentalities thereof, and all individuals, firms, corporations, or other persons acting for the United States and with the authorization and consent of the United States."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MrGuy on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:06AM
Let's say you could get into court, prove the government copied your website and used your trademarks without permission and with an intent to mislead. That's what the Lanham act [wikipedia.org] is all about.
Congratulations! Now what does it get you?
The standard for damages is creating confusion in the marketplace and/or causing the trademark owner to suffer harm.
What exactly is the harm suffered by the trademark owner? The standard here is "substantial effect" on commerce. The loss of a few cents of ad revenue by not service "real" ads to someone visiting "fake" facebook ain't gonna cut it.
One option is a notional "people will think Facebook is riddled with malware!" Even that's not very strong - only very specific people see the fake site, and by design they don't know the malware is there.
I suppose you could argue that, now that this has been revealed to be a thing that's been done, that people will be less likely to visit Facebook because they fear they MAY be intercepted by the government. "People have lost faith in Facebook to the extent that it materially harms Facebook's business" is a pretty strong assertion to make, however, and I'd question they'd have dat actually showing this is the case.