Starbucks has an unofficial blog, as do Apple, Google. But Craigslist has not had a blog, unofficial or otherwise (unless you count Craig Newmark's thoughts on national politics). That changed last month when Tim White launched the unofficial Craigslist Blog. Now White's blog has been countered with an official one, written by CEO Jim Buckmaster. Between posts, Buckmaster decided to threaten a lawsuit. Chilling Effects suggests Tim White, the blogger behind the unofficial site, might have a case for saving his site's domain name. Buckmaster's letter, and White's feisty response, after the jump:

Peter Walls is the chief executive of a "social housing firm" in the UK. John Finn owns a rival housing firm. One day, Finn started a website called dadsplace.co.uk, and on that website, many anonymous people said many mean, mean things about Walls. They accused Walls of nepotism and sleeping with underlings and other sorts of things like that. Then Walls sued Finn for libel. He just won! He won one hundred thousand pounds, which is around eleventy-billion dollars. Injunctions were filed against two of the anonymous commenters who said these mean things! In other words, being anonymously bitchy on the internet is quite dangerous in England. Which is why there is not really so much of a market for "gossip blogs" there, you see. As Denton just told us, this case "serves as a reminder that the abuse that we take as our god-given right to inflict, or duty to tolerate, is illegal in many places." God bless the U.S.A.. [Guardian]

Many blogs are writing up a recent lawsuit against Apple as if it's a big deal. Too bad it isn't, because it's more entertaining than any April Fools' joke we've seen today. The lawsuit alleges that Apple falsely marketed its 20-inch iMac as being capable of displaying "millions of colors" when it can only display "hundreds of thousands" of colors. The difference is imperceptible to the human eye. Apple recently settled a similar lawsuit over its MacBook notebooks. That lawsuit went away out of court after the plaintiffs found it "difficult" to locate clients who purchased computers solely on the "millions of colors" claim. We're waiting for a clever lawyer to start asking Apple customers if they bought computers under the belief the machines would help them get laid.

While Richard Bottoms's sexual discrimination case against Penthouse Media Group continues, the Palo Alto man angry with his dismissal from the company tells us he's now planing a new round of suits against the company, seeking $1 in damages. In an email to Penthouse management announcing his plans to sue, Bottoms alleged that company developers were instructed to copy eHarmony.com when building sites Alt.com and Bondage.com.

Score one for the bitter old queen. Barry Diller, battling with major IAC shareholder John Malone in court, has won the right to break up IAC without interference from Malone's Liberty. This solves one problem for Diller, but creates another. Instead of running one hodgepodge of Internet businesses, he'll have five of them to worry about. Sparring with Malone, a business ally turned enemy, will look simple compared to regaining Wall Street's affections.

Investor Carl Icahn has sued Motorola to force the company to release internal documents about its cell-phone handset business. Icahn is pursuing a proxy fight to install new directors on Motorola's board and force the company to spin off or sell its handset business. Motorola calls the lawsuit a "distraction." [FT]

"We now accept that the item was totally untrue," the aptly titled British blog/email list Popbitch said in a statement. The item was about British actor Max Beesley, left, who, according to the site, had tried to curate an orgy with three other women while in Cannes. Beesley sued the site over the story, and Popbitch agreed to pay him compensation and legal costs. Popbitch is always nasty, and UK celebs quite enjoy suing the media, but still—aren't all men, everywhere, trying to arrange a foursome at all times? At least the site didn't claim he was spreading a venereal disease to these women. [Guardian]

We received a lovely email last night from Stephanie Burton, the editor-in-chief of CollegeOTR, a college blog network. Burton tells us that she and her boss were looking for a PR firm to get them some visibility, and someone referred them to 5WPR, helmed by incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian. When they asked the agency about Ronn's bad press, "They brushed off our concerns about Ronn's reputation and blamed "jilted" news reporters for the bad press," she writes. [An interesting formulation: reporters who dislike 5W for legitimate reasons are "jilted!"] CollegeOTR eventually decided not to hire Ronn and 5W. And now, after learning more about his "Cunt" related history (summed up here)," she says, "The fact that we even considered working with him is more than slightly nauseating." That's edumacational! And after the jump, Ronn speaks out (and gets spoken about)!

Yesterday, the British media went wild with accusations that Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, was "Client 6" in the notorious FBI affidavit that exposed the Emperors' Club VIP prostitution ring. About four hours later, every paper than ran that story took it down. Because Grosvenor is the richest man in the UK, and his rich-people lawyers (or "barristers" [Denton says these don't count as 'barristers']) threatened all of them with libel suits. Selections from Gawker's own threatening attorney letter and a bit more on Grosvenor's dirty past, after the jump.

When Viacom sued Google for $1 billion over copyright infringement on YouTube last year, it seemed unlikely Viacom lawyers would ever win that much. Now it will be that much harder. Judge Louis Stanton ruled that Viacom will not be awarded "punitive damages." If Viacom wins the case, any money it gets from Google will be a sum determined only by how much the alleged copyright infringement cost Viacom. Since Viacom executives argued during the writers' strike that they weren't making any money online, they may have a tough case getting anything.

When Ronn [sic] Torossian, the incompetent superflack and 5WPR CEO who reps characters ranging from softcore porn king Joe Francis to nutty televangelist Benny Hinn Ministries, sued his former HR director Melissa Weiss last week, he was using a classic PR tactic: getting out ahead of the story. Ronn alleged in his suit that Weiss helped an employee leave 5W, thereby violating her contract. But Weiss has her own side of the story: that she was fired because she protested extensive, ongoing labor violations at 5WPR. What we know—because we have the evidence—is that on Friday, Ronn sent Weiss an email threatening, "You will pay for the rest of your life for trying to ruin my business." The subject line read, "YOU STUPID CUNT."

5WPR CEO and shouty flack Ronn [sic] Torossian has filed a lawsuit against Melissa Weiss, his recently departed HR director, for helping a 5WPR employee look for another job. Let's make this clear: While Weiss was in charge of 5W's human resources department, the suit alleges that she was simultaneously helping a 5W account executive look for a job with another firm. The evidence consists of several emails between her and the other (now former) 5W employee, Maureen Lynch. Lynch tells us the suit is "a complete lie" and that the emails are unrelated. We have a call in to Weiss' attorney. On one hand, it's understandable that Ronn wouldn't want HIS OWN HR DIRECTOR—who was hired just last month—steering employees towards the competition. On the other hand, what would it say about life at 5W if that actually happened? From a PR standpoint, it may have been wiser to keep this quiet. Oh well! Ronn is seeking $360,000 in damages on each of three counts in the suit. After the jump, the smoking gun (?) emails that make up the evidence.

A jury has awarded six big ones to crazy fun local liberal weekly the San Francisco Bay Guardian, on the grounds its crosstown rival the SF Weekly — which qualifies as right-wing propaganda around here — basically gave away ads in an attempt to drive the Guardian out of business. The Chronicle's report is all you need to read. Don't bother looking for the alleged "barbs in daily blogs from the courtroom" between the two papers. It's more fun to click Guardian articles at random. When you start to wonder if covert Republican operative Gavin Newsom arranged the tiger attack to divert attention from PG&E's role in the Cosco Busan spill, then it's time to stop.

Village Voice Media owes the San Francisco Bay-Guardian $15.6 million damages for predatory probing. Trying to put another company out of business is apparently illegal in San Francisco! We're just forced to wonder how this will affect the VV's smug billboard campaign on the Bowery about how New York is played out because there aren't junkies anymore and also its most respected lefty alt-weekly is owned by some libertarian assholes in Phoenix. [MaggieShnayerson.com]

Indian tech services firm Patni Computer Systems was ordered to pay $2.4 million in back wages to 607 workers in the U.S. on H-1B visas after a widespread underpayment of wages was discovered. Vishal Goel, a worker, profiled by BusinessWeek, is suing Patni, saying he was paid half what he was promised when he signed up. The company threatened to brand him a "troublemaker" and said his parents in India would be harassed unless he kept quiet. How does this affect Americans? H1-B employees are required to be paid the "prevailing wage" for their job position to prevent salaries from being depressed. Instead of the $44,000 wage which was common for his position, Goel was paid $35,000 — and that only after 552 hours of overtime.

Judith Regan, former high-powered publisher with News Corp.'s HaperCollins, who notoriously carried on a gross affair with disgraced criminal former top cop Bernie Kerik in a Ground Zero apartment, and who was fired for, among other things, embarrassing the company with her O.J. Simpson book (and some alleged anti-Semitic comments), and who settled a wrongful dismissal suit with News Corp. for a rumored $20m–$25m (or maybe $10m) will need that money to pay off her old lawyers, whom she dismissed in favor of showbiz law legend Bert Fields. Regan's old lawyers at Dreier LLP say they worked 1,200 hours and received only $125,000. Fields says the suit brought by the old attorneys is without merit. And it was reported in Page Six, a happy part of the News Corp. cabal family. [NYP]

A pile of internal emails (PDF) between Microsoft execs have surfaced as part of a suit against the company. The suit alleges that the company mislead customers in 2006 labeling PCs "Windows Vista Capable." And to judge by the emails from Microsoft execs, Microsofties agreed with the plaintiffs. One exec, Mike Nash, writes that Vista turned his $2,100 PC into nothing but an "email machine." In another, exec Steven Sinofsky confessed his Office team didn't start work on a Vista version until late 2006 because "No one really believed we would ever ship." Read the rest for yourself, below.

Since Microsoft announced its $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo on February 1, shareholders have filed six lawsuits against Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the rest of its board, according to the company's annual 10-K report. Two lawsuits from Michigan pension funds allege Yang and the board breached their duties to shareholders when they rejected Microsoft's bid. Two of four California plaintiffs, however, allege the board erred by supposedly favoring Microsoft's unsolicited proposal. Almost 27 million Yahoo shares traded hands today. Why didn't these complainers just sell their shares? That seems easier.

Yesterday, a man named Clive Campbell filed a wacky $5 billion lawsuit against rap star and partial New Jersey Nets owner Jay-Z, as well as others associated with the huge Atlantic Yards construction project in downtown Brooklyn (which includes a new stadium for the Nets). The charge was that because Barclay's bought naming rights to the stadium, and was possibly involved in the slave trade way back when, everyone involved was illegally profiting from slavery. So that will be dismissed quickly. More interesting: Clive Campbell is the real name of DJ Kool Herc, the old school master widely credited as the founder of hip hop. So outlets started reporting that Kool Herc was suing Jay-Z—intergenerational hip hop madness! But then it came out that this was a different Clive Campbell [Gothamist]. Too bad, cause that would have been crazy. Now Jay-Z can turn his attention to warding off this "Voodoo Priestest"!:

Two Detroit-based pension funds representing police, firefighters and public employees filed suit against Yahoo, alleging CEO Jerry Yang and the company acted in bad faith by placing "personal distaste for Microsoft ahead of shareholder welfare" and pursuing "value destructive" alternatives. The suits follow another from the the Wayne County Employee's Retirement System of Michigan. Why don't they just sell their shares? That would be easier.