I reported a few days ago about TechCrush (and has been noticed by a few others) the outfit started up by a couple German entrepreneurs.

Seems like their raison d’etre was to keep an eye on Web2.0 companies profiled by TechCrunch in the days, weeks, months and possibly years afterwards — possibly providing a more balanced opinion after the hype has had a chance to settle.

My own smarmy opinions aside, I think this is a great idea. Follow up will keep everyone a little more honest, and hopefully act as a balance for the exuberance around these emerging technologies.

Back to the story: Its only been up for a few days, and it looks like its already been grounded.

With less than 10 posts underneath their belt, covering Flock, iKarma and Jigsaw, the latest post, titled “The Lion Sleeps Tonight (not)“, dated 9/21/06 says the following.

We put down our pencils here at the Crush-Room for the next days due to possible legal issues. Please stay with us, we will see how things are going to work out.

What legal issues do you think? How about the ones mentioned by Mike “Mr. Web2.0″ Arrington mentioned on this website himself:

i think this kind of thing is a good check against techcrunch and will keep us honest…I will say though that when companies start to fail we cover that too. My lawyers are pissy about our trademark and want us to send them a letter. I need to contact them to talk when they launch.

Well, I have no idea if he did, or what they talked about.

But in this era of copyright sensitivity, one wonders if there’s an ongoing exchange regarding TechCrush’s name infringing on TechCrunch’s. There was a recent imbroglio over at Digg (check out the Digg History, ‘natch), where Digg was forced to use its lawyers to send a cease and desist over to a relatively small time operator because of a similarity in name. (Ironically TechCrunch covered the whole issue as well. )

The domain name THEY used was “DiggGames.com”. In the fallout discussions, it was generally believed that although using lawyers wasn’t entirely consistent with the way Digg seemed to operate until that point — but the legalities of trademark or copyright law meant that they had to. Without enforcing their own work, it seemed like they could be open to any number of violations in the future which would be hard to defend.

Is TechCrush finding itself under a similar litigious onslaught? Well, I’ve asked for a brief interview with them — so we’ll keep you updated as we’re able to.

But if DiggGames is any proof, I suspect that the next time we see TechCrush it may have evolved into a different name entirely.