United Kingdom

The City of London Police are embarking on a "radical" pilot project in which the details of fraud suspects will be shared with law firms so they can try to use the civil courts to seize the suspects' assets, The Guardian's Vikram Dodd reports.

Questions are being raised on whether the profit motive for the law firms could damage the fairness of the process. Questions are also being raised on the wisdom of transferring punishment from the state system to private law firms and to civil courts.

British law enforcement is turning to the law firms and civil courts because of the high volume of cybercrime.

A British photojournalist was arrested by police as he used a drone above the scene of a fatal fire, The Guardian's Ben Quinn reports. Even though Eddie Mitchell had permission from the landowner to use his drone and is one of the few journalists authorized by the Civil Aviation Authority (the UK equivalent to the Federal Aviation Administration) to fly drones, he was held in police custody for more than 5 hours and had the controller to his drone snatched from his hands. Mitchell told The Guardian "'it was an incredibly dangerous thing that they did. They didn’t know the dangers that they were putting myself, themselves and passing air traffic in. It could have flown off in any direction. They were passing the controller between themselves and eventually got it down with a thud.”'

The Wall Street Journal will now be able to report the names of individuals that British prosecutors plan to implicate in a criminal case alleging that they were involved in a scheme to manipulate "benchmark interest rates," that paper reports today. The judge in the case will not contine a temporary order barring the WSJ from publishing the names in England and Wales as well as to remove the identities of those people on-line. Prosecutors had sought the order. Dow Jones & Co., WSJ's publisher, had called the order "a serious affront to press freedom," WSJ also reported.

Bloomberg reports that Cadbury has lost a court fight with Nestle in the United Kingdom Court of Appeal to exclusively trademark the purple packaging of chocolate bars. Nestle "overturned an October 2012 decision that ruled the color purple was distinctive to the maker of Dairy Milk bars. The ruling allows Nestle, and any other confectioners, to sell chocolate products with the same colored wrapping," Bloomberg also reported.

The Washington Post has a fun slideshow of other businesses that have been able to trademark color hues as distinctive to their products in the marketplace: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/name-that-color-cadbury-p...