This is kind of a bizarre item. It looks like a group called Jews for Jesus is suing Google because somebody registered the Blogspot domain http://jewsforjesus.blogspot.com/. Blogger is owned by Google, and Jews for Jesus is not pleased that someone is using their name:

Jews for Jesus has sued the search engine giant claiming that a weblog running on Google owned Blogger.com service is infringes its trademark. They have filed this lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in New York on Wednesday and are aiming to get control of the disputed weblog. They are also demanding an unspecified amount in compensation.

Susan Perlman, associate executive director with Jews for Jesus said in a statement: “We have a right to our own name and Google has allowed the use of our name on Blogspot without our permission. Our reputation is at stake.” However, the interesting thing in this lawsuit is that Google itself is not involved in the process of creation of the weblog in dispute.

The ultimate irony in a situation like this would be for Jesus to come back and sue this (or any) organization for inappropriately using his name. Hm, I didn’t realize this, but according to the blogger who set up that site, Jews for Jesus is actually a front group for Christian Fundamentalist evangelization directed at Jews:

Jews for Jesus is the “name brand” in Fundamentalist missions to the Jews. They take pride in their confrontational style of evangelism, boasting that their mission is to “make the messiahship of jesus an unavoidable issue…” This blog is being established as a forum for those interested in exchanging both the positive and the negative aspects of the missions methodology, the state of relationship between the organization (or the church, etc) and the Jewish community at large, and the inner workings of the organization as compared to other missions/ministries/corporations in the United States and throughout the world.

Well, that makes a little more sense now why they have had such an irritable response to this whole thing. They are interested in protecting their brand and likely have a good bit of money behind them. It’s not the simple light-hearted operation that it seems. I’ll have to do some more digging on this group and see who the puppet-master really is.

Obviously, this also raises some interesting tech issues, which I’ll post over at the tech blog, rather than getting off-topic here.