McDonald's lost a super-sized trademark ruling Tuesday, with Malaysia's highest court allowing an Indian restaurant called McCurry to use the "Mc" prefix, despite the U.S. fast-food giant's objections.

McCurry's owner said the prefix is an abbreviation for Malaysian Chicken Curry, according to The Associated Press.

A three-member panel of the Federal Court ruled Tuesday that McDonald's can't appeal a lower court's ruling for McCurry in the eight-year dispute.

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Consider the following hypothetical scenario: An attorney searches for an adverse party in an Internet search engine and discovers that the party has a Facebook page. The attorney reviews the limited public information available on the party's Facebook page, but he realizes that if he asks to be online "friends" with the party he will be able to access much more detailed, private information about that party. This private information is only available to users the party accepts as "friends." The attorney suspects that the private information may contain relevant information about the party's credibility or the lawsuit.

Taking advantage of the fact that many social networking users are less than discriminating when accepting "friend" requests, the attorney wonders whether he may ask a third party, such as his paralegal, to attempt to "friend" the party in order to obtain access to the party's private information. The party and the paralegal are not acquaintances, but the paralegal would use his actual name and other identifying information in an attempt to "friend" the party. Of course, to gain access without raising suspicion, the paralegal would not reveal his affiliation with the attorney or the motivation for becoming "friends." The question that arises out of this hypothetical is whether, from an ethical perspective, a cyberspace "friend" could become a foe.

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Environmentalists say the U.S. Forest Service is using the pretense of "road maintenance" to log ancient trees in Giant Sequoia National Monument. Sequoia Forestkeeper claims in Federal Court that the Hume Roadside Logging Project could remove "large-diameter old-growth trees across thousands of acres from a protected National Monument."

The logging would threaten Pacific fishers and California spotted owls in the southern Sierra Nevada, and would violate a forest management plan, the group says.

Tree removal is permitted in the monument only "if clearly needed for ecological restoration and maintenance or public safety."

The Forest Service falsely invoked this road repair exclusion without considering impacts to the fisher and owl, the group claims.

Sequoias are among the biggest trees in the world, and can live up to 3,500 years.

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After losing a number of key partners in recent weeks, Cooley Godward Kronish is picking up three IP litigators from White & Case.

Palo Alto, Calif., partners Heidi Keefe, Mark Weinstein and Mark Lambert joined Cooley Monday. The three represent clients like Facebook, Cisco Systems and HTC Corp. in patent cases.

The additions come shortly after seven well-known Cooley partners hit the exits. The departures started when M&A stars Keith Flaum and Richard Climan left for Dewey & LeBoeuf in July.

"We are going to an institution storied in the Valley, with connections in the tech space that are unrivaled," Keefe said. "The opportunity to serve our clients that are connected to the tech world are so synergistic."

While several of the recent Cooley departures have left for more global firms, the White & Case lawyers said they were going to Cooley because of its local connections with tech companies.

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