Australian supermarket chain Woolworths has gone too far with its logo, according to Apple’s intellectual property lawyers. Concerned that “‘consumers may not be able to differentiate between the two brands,” Apple lawyers have told Australia’s intellectual property regulators to ban the logo. Mashable has more:

When it comes to defending their trademarks and logos, no company is more fervent than Apple. If they could challenge Victoria School of Business and Technology for having a logo too similar to theirs, then you can certainly expect them to sue Woolworths, especially if Woolworths’ trademark application is a blanket one, extending to electrical goods and technology.

Woolworths has tried to avoid using the word “apple”, and the designer of the logo, Hans Hulsbosch, claims Apple is taking things too far. ”Based on this logic, they would have to take action against every fruit-seller,” he said. However, one has to admit that the two logos have similarities, and that there’s actually a good chance (unlike the Victoria School of Business and Technology’s case) of Woolworths selling devices similar to those sold by Apple.

If Woolworths logo really looks like an apple, does that mean Apple owns the rights to all apple symbols? Apple’s legal chest-thumping seems like a stretch.

Most doctors will write you a prescription for a cheaper generic drug in place of the same drug that’s still under patent as a more expensive name brand. There’s just no need to pay the premium. But generics aren’t always available even when the patent for the original drug has run out. The reason is because of what’s known in the pharmaceutical industry as ‘pay to delay’ payments.

These ‘pay to delay’ agreements are settlements where a brand-name drug manufacturer pays a generic competitor to abandon a patent challenge and therefore delay entering the market in direct competition. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the tactic has become a common practice in the pharmaceutical industry .

In a speech last month before the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said that eliminating these the pay to delay payments is a top priority of the Commission because doing so would save consumers $3.5 billion a year. He also stated that the US federal government pays about one-third of all prescription drug costs.

Pending legislation (H.R. 1706, the Protecting Consumer Access to Generic Drugs Act of 2009) would ban or restrict what Leibowitz describes as anti-competitive patent settlements to control prescription drug costs, restore generic competition, and help pay for healthcare reform.

The Hatch-Waxman Act was designed to make it easier for generic drugs to enter the market while at the same time protecting brand-name manufacturers with patent protection crucial to ensuring they continue costly research. While the legislation initially worked to lower prices for consumers, drug companies soon realized they could delay generic competition by paying them not to enter the market.

Image Credit: bartificial, Flickr

Last Friday afternoon I came home to an excited message on my answering machine (yeah, I still have one of those…) My mother wanted to know if I’d seen Oprah, if I knew about the Kindles. At first I thought she was talking about some unique family, like the Duggars. But later that day I heard the news that Oprah Winfrey had once again sprinkled her magical TV dust over the publishing industry.

First she just suggested them….

Oprah started driving book sales over a decade ago with her selections for Oprah’s Book Club. It quickly became apparent that a nod from The Great One could ensure an author’s livelihood, and even fame, for years to come. Just ask James Frey. Okay – bad example.

Next, she took them online…

Oprah’s series of online classes, or interviews, with Eckhart Tolle took his book, A New Earth, from certain obscurity to a worldwide phenomena. (In the process it got her branded as the anti-Christ in some circles, but that’s another story.)

Then she gave them away…

Last summer Winfrey teamed up with recurring Oprah Show guest Suze Orman to offer Orman’s latest book, Women & Money, for free in digital format. Orman professed that the offer was “not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it”. However, the move didn’t exactly hurt sales. Instead, it built excitement for the book across other formats. Over a million copies were downloaded.

And now, she’s fully digital…

I have my doubts that a woman who held out on getting a cell phone until 2008 suddenly gets so gadget-happy that she devotes the good part of an hour of television and her brand to the digital book reader Kindle. However “life changing” the device actually is or is not for Oprah, one thing is certain: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is happy about it.

Who knows, my mom may even buy one.

From Reuters:

“Fool’s Gold” star Kate Hudson has been sued by a firm that says hair care products she developed with hair stylist-to-the-stars David Babaii are based on ideas for using volcanic ash that the firm developed.

But Babaii went on to use a company called Universal Packaging Systems Inc to develop the products — using the volcanic ash component. Hudson promoted the product in a 2007 interview with Vogue magazine and said she was one of the developers, the lawsuit states.

220 Laboratories’ allegations against Hudson, Babaii and Universal included misappropriation of trade secrets, fraud and breach of contract. The company is seeking an injunction to block David Babaii for WildAid from using its “trade secrets” in the sale of hair care products.

According to the legal documents, 220 Labs had researched and developed a product for Babaii over a period of about nine months, based on an oral contract. During this time, 220 Labs developed at least 10 custom products for Babaii, for which they sent him samples. They also sent Babaii ingredients lists, ingredients stories, pricing information, marketing ideas, and promotional footage.

Almost a year after Babaii and 220 Labs had entered into their relationship, a 220 Labs competitor called Universal requested volcanic ash samples from the company, purportedly for a hair care line. 220 Labs sent them the samples.

Babaii then released the product, called David Babaii for WildAid–featuring pictures of an earthy-looking Kate Hudson cavorting with baby wildcats—without giving 220 Labs the kickback it felt it deserved.

Thus, the lawsuit.

I had a couple of thoughts on this case. First, can you sue someone based on an oral contract? It turns out that oral contracts are legally just as valid as written agreements. The problem is proving that they exist, or proving the terms. Lawyers use plaintiff or defendant action following the contract to prove its existence.

After you enter an oral contract in California, you only have two years to sue someone for breaching it. No wonder 220 Labs jumped on the case.

Secondly, why would you send your competitor a sample of your proprietary ingredient (in this case, volcanic ash)? According to the Economic Espionage Act of 1996,

Effective enforcement of laws governing unauthorized disclosure of proprietary or trade secret information generally requires that the owner of this information must have taken reasonable measures to safeguard it from unauthorized disclosure.

Sending a proprietary ingredient to your competitor doesn’t sound like a reasonable protective measure to me. Nor does handling a large account for nine months without a written contract.

Does 220 Labs have a case? Yes. So does Kate Hudson. I think both parties had it coming.

Proud to be an American? There’s reason. We have a beautiful country filled with natural and man-made wonders. We’re home to some of the world’s most talented business innovators. And we, the people, reserve the right to sue anyone we want for anything we want.

You’re next, Victoria’s Secret. Because there’s nothing like an unruly thong to provoke a latent lawsuit. How the woman damaged her eye with her underwear is beyond me. But does she really need Vic’s to reimburse her for it? According to ABC News,

The thong, a Victoria’s Secret Sexy Little Thing low-rise v-string, had a heart-shaped pendant attached to the fabric with a metal fastener, according to the lawsuit. When Patterson was changing after work, the metal piece snapped, creating a “slingshot effect,” and either the pendant or the metal piece “cut her eye…”

Here are 15 more of the nation’s dumbest corporate lawsuits. Just in case you needed reminding:

15. A Florida woman sued a guide-dog school because a blind man being guided by one of the dogs stepped on her foot.

14. A man sued McDonald’s for “failing to warn customers about the dangers of eating and driving.” The impetus? A man who’d spilled a milkshake on his lap at the drive-thru collided with the defendant’s car.

13. An Idaho college student decided to moon his friends, and fell out the window as a result. So he sued the college for not providing enough warning signs in upper-story windows.

12. A dry cleaner lost Roy Pearson’s pants, causing him great mental suffering. He alluded to the dry cleaner’s “satisfaction guarantee” as an excuse to sue the company for $67 million.

11. A man from Montana sued Viacom for plagiarizing his name. The man’s legal name is Jack Ass, and Jack Ass sued because the TV show Jackass infringed on the copyright and trademark of his name. And “defamed his good character.” (The man, nee Bob Craft, changed his name to Jack Ass in 1997 in order to “raise awareness about drunken driving.”)

10. A convenience store worker in West Virginia injured her back while opening a jar of pickles. The store awarded her $2,699,000 in punitive damages, $130,066 in compensation and another $170,000 for her emotional distress.

9. A couple from Columbia, SC lost their son to a killer whale. He was found dead and naked on the back of an orca whale at SeaWorld Orlando. He had drowned after sneaking into the whale tank and going for a swim with the killer whale. The couple sued SeaWorld Orlando, “alleging the dangerous orca was portrayed as a huggable stuffed toy. Attorney Patricia Sigman said SeaWorld is legally liable because it portrayed the killer whale as human loving.”

8. A pair of Chicago attorneys filed a class action suit against Penthouse magazine, because they failed to “see tennis sensation Anna Kournikova without her racket and tennis outfit.” The damages? $8.99 each, or the price of the magazine.

7. Consumer Meredith Berkman filed a class-action suit against Robert’s Foods, who make a snack called Pirate’s Booty, for $50 million. Four months prior, Robert’s had recalled its product because food labels understated calories by 27 and fat by 6 grams. Berkman’s suit claimed “emotional distress” and “weight gain…mental anguish, outrage and indignation…The complaint claims to represent all consumers who ruined their diets and had to spend more time at the gym because they ate mislabeled Pirate’s Booty.”

6. In 1995, passengers on an LA-New York American Airlines flight experienced extreme turbulence for 20 seconds. Passengers sued the airline for the “psychological impact of the twenty eight seconds of terror.” Their reward? $2 million.

5. Nita Bird, a woman having outpatient surgery, had something go wrong during surgery. Surgeons rushed her down the hallway into another room in order to save her life. Her two daughters saw their mother being rushed down the hallway, appearing to be in extremely poor physical condition. The two daughters sued the doctors and the hospital for causing them emotional distress. They shouldn’t have had to see Mom like that, and it was the hospital’s fault. That case was lost–in the California Supreme Court.

4. Bennie Casson had a stripper slam him on the head and neck with her two 40-pound breasts, contusing and bruising his neck. He sued the strip club for $200,000 for the mental anguish, indignity, and emotional distress he experienced after the incident.

3. Employees at the Las Vegas Hilton and Mandalay Bay Hotel kept handing a drunk man money to gamble with. He had a hard night, losing more than $1 million. So he sued the two hotels for supposedly knowing he was “drunk as a skunk” and continuing to give him gambling money anyway.

2. A British dollmaker with dark tastes decided to turn Barbie into a “Dungeon Doll” in rubber bondage dress and a helmet. Mattel sued the dollmaker for copyright infringement. The judge wrote them off, claiming the Dungeon Doll poses no threat to regular Barbie sales.

1. Yup, here it is again. The infamous 1992 McDonald’s coffee case. Stella Liebeck spilled McDonald’s coffee on her lap in the drive-thru, scalding her genitals, buttocks, and inner thigh. She received more than $2.7 million in damages. (To her credit, she wasn’t the first one to have trouble with Micky D’s scalding coffee.)

(Source: Stupid Lawsuit Collection)

New research shows that co-workers hoard their best ideas.

Have you ever asked a colleague for information, only to have them ignore your request? Did you feel they were purposely avoiding you or only pretending to be ignorant? You may have been right.

Catherine Connelly, assistant professor of human resources & management at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, has found that employees often protect their knowledge and will even take steps to hide it from co-workers

In a world where every interview with a Fortune 500 will quote him/her saying that knowledge sharing is important, the opposite is happening. Yet more proof that something isn't right in the world of business, particularly in the way(s) that we work.

Why can't speed dating, speed networking, etc. take place online using Skype or something similar? Here's how it would work. I go to a site and set up my 'meeting.' It can be for dating, networking, job interviews, or whatever. I can set a price to participate, or I can make it free. I can set the number of people that can sign up. Then, at the predetermined meeting time, the software takes control and controls the switching. At the pre-set time limit (1 min, 2 min, 5 min, etc.) the software shuts down the existing connection and matches everyone up with someone new for a new time period. Maybe it calls using Skype IDs, or maybe you have to log on to the company's website. The software controls the speed networking part of the project. Of course, the website is free for events less than 30 minutes with 10 or fewer people, and you pay for larger and more complex events. If an event organizer charges a fee, the site takes a cut when people register.

I don't think there is anything like this out there, but it is something I would use if someone built it. Actually, I would try to build it but I've got too many other ideas on my plate right now, and the amount of caffeine I have a day is probably already in the not-healthy-in-the-long-run range.

Companies who once were acquisition-crazy, says Chaudhuri, soon realized that while buying technologies was easy, making them pay off was not. Indeed, researchers looking at mergers and acquisitions in tech fields have acknowledged for years that the challenges of successful acquisitions are significant, as are the challenges of post-acquisition integration. Yet they have also suggested that the strategy of buying young companies with early-stage technologies in emerging markets is a good way of hedging against the possibility of missing out on major technological advances. Further, they have generally agreed that once a purchasing company finds an integration strategy that works well, this strategy can be applied to almost any acquisition.

But after spending two years studying the M&A activity of three top communications equipment and software firms, Chaudhuri says those assumptions are wrong. "What I did was reframe how we look at acquisitions," he notes.

So much has been written about the problems with acquisitions and how they contribute so little to bottom line that I have to reach one of two conclusions.

1)All this "M&A" doesn't add value is wrong, and only focuses on a handful of high profile deals that are bad

or

2)Corporate leaders realize most acqusitions fail, but they think they will do a better job than everyone else. This is the "yes, but" strategy – I realize most people fail at this but I'm different. It makes sense, because you need some of that attitude to rise to the C-level in most companies. I just wonder how many executives/companies analyze their past M&A decisions to see if their supposed value was ever realized.

There are two problemlems with RSS. 1) I subscribe to something I think I will like, for instance Forbes management news, and they put out 8 articles a day, only 6-7 of which interest me. Multiply that 6 or 7 by 200 feeds and I am still wading through lots of crap. 2) There may be a feed I don't want to subscribe to, like Ladies Home Journal, which may still put out 2-3 articles a year that interest me. I would like those articles to make it to me. If you can solve those two problemlems, you have built a great RSS reader.

My solution was to build a society of autonomous agents. The agents will each have very simple roles. A handful of major agents harvest links and sort them out to the next level of agents, which specialize in broad categories. So for instance there is an agent that carries all the political posts, regardless of which feed they came through. There is an agent that carries all the business feeds, etc. etc. At every level, the agents get more and more specialized, and their number increases. At the bottom, right before the user-agent level, you have agents that contain feeds on very specialized topics, despite where they came from, and many feeds are carried by more than one agent at this level.

Each user has an agent that learns about him/her. Every post that is passed to the user can be rated on a scale of 1-10, if the user chooses. Over time this agent learns what the user likes.

The agent learns where to go to get feeds that match the users keywords and feed subscriptions, but also has a "wander" function such that it spends spare time interfacing with other agents at various levels, including the agents of other users, to see if it finds anything the user might like. It learns over time which agents to talk with to get the best information.

All the links the agent finds are put on a list and given an initial ranking of 1. A whole other society of agents exists that do nothing but scroll through a group of users and adjust the ranking of each article. So for instance, an agent comes along and says "hmmm… this contains a lot of business related words, and rob_business tends to like articles/posts like that, so I'm going to increase the score of this article by 1." Another agent may say "this is from a site that rob_business typically doesn't like, even when they post about topics he does like, so I'm going to decrease his score by 1." Another agent may come along and say "70% of our system users have read this article, and rob_business likes to see articles that are popular, so I'm going to increase the score of this by 2.1." Then add in a function that causes the score of each article to naturally decay over time, because older news is less relevant and interesting. At any time, I can log in to the site and view my top 20 (or however many I want) ranked links, and they should be different than everyone else's top 20. Rather than having a complex algorithm, it's the culmination of the votes of many simple agents that determines what the score of a post is.

I think this can be applied in a broad sense to search in general. The problemlem with web searches is that you want the information right then. This society of agents can be given time to work, because I may only check my feeds once or twice a day. My hope is that they learn to pass around links the way people do with each other. For instance, the way I recommend a book or movie to a friend with similar interests, or tell my sister that she won't like a certain band that I like because I know her tastes.

There are two problemlems with this approach. First, it could turn out to be very computationally intensive to have all these agents running around. Or maybe not. I don't know. The second problemlem is the more general problemlem with these type of distributed A.I. solutions. People don't like them because we tend to think top-down and this is a bottom-up design. So we don't really know how successful it will be at the top level until we try it. My hope is to discover that personalization is an emergent property of this agent based society.

In his book "Why Innovation Fails"*, Carl Franklin quotes an intriguing study by three academics, Donald Lehmann at Columbia University in New York, and Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The researchers looked at 197 product innovations, of which 111 were successes and 86 failures. What they found was that the successful innovations had some, or all, of the following features: they were moderately new to the market, based on tried and tested technology, saved money, met customers' needs and supported existing practices. By contrast, the products that failed were based on cutting-edge or untested technology, followed a "me-too" approach, or were created with no clearly defined solution in mind.

So far, so obvious. What was much less so was the researchers' list of "idea factors"-where the ideas for the innovations came from, and how they determined the success or otherwise of the ensuing innovation. For instance, "need spotting" involved actively looking for an answer to a known problem, while "solution spotting" meant finding a new way of using an existing piece of technology-much as the CD player capitalised on the recently invented laser diode. "Mental inventions" were things dreamed up in the head with little reference to the outside world, while "random events" were serendipitous moments when innovators stumbled on something they were not looking for but immediately recognised its significance. The two other sources of ideas were "market research" and "trend following".

When the team plotted the success-to-failure rate of the six different idea factors, the two worst by far turned out to be trend following and mental inventions. Both produced three times as many failures as successes. By contrast, need spotting produced twice as many successes as failures. Market research generated four times more, and solution spotting seven times more successes than failures. But the clear winner in the innovation stakes was "taking advantage of random events", which generated 13 times more successes than failures.

This is why companies like Google let employees spend work time on non-work things. Time spent doing non-work related tasks may lead to more of these random events. I know it seems counterintuitive – less time spent *working* could lead to more profit via more innovation – but in many industries it is true.