Well, here’s a story you don’t see every day. Roy alerts us to a report that Israeli software distributor EIM is suing Microsoft over a terminated contract. Microsoft claims the contract was terminated due to filing fraudulent sales reports, but EIM says the real reason was that EIM representatives refused to take part in a sex and drug party aboard a cruise put together by Microsoft for Turkish and Israeli distributors. EIM claims that there were women who would perform sexual services in attendance, as well as some “illegal substances,” and EIM representatives were encouraged to partake of both, though they refused. Microsoft has sued back, claiming breach of contract by EIM — though apparently refuses to comment about the cruise allegations. Of course, you would think that with other distributors on the cruise, some might be able to confirm or deny the allegations — and if there were any others who chose not to partake, it would be worth knowing if they, too, lost their contracts. The whole thing seems pretty bizarre, frankly. Even if Microsoft apparently did throw such a party, it still seems like EIM would have a tough time proving that its contract was terminated for its representatives’ failure to participate.

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It seems like every year there’s some sort of controversy over trademarks and the Superbowl. Of course, the NFL has been famous for aggressively defending trademarks. For example, it’s been so aggressive in claiming that no one other than official sponsors can even mention the word Superbowl (even though it should be legal if used descriptively and accurately), that when many advertisers started switching to the euphemism “The Big Game,” the NFL tried to trademark that too, even though it wasn’t even the one who had come up with the phrase. This year, apparently, the big issue is over who owns the phrase “Who Dat” which is apparently a catch-phrase associated with the Superbowl- Big Game- Final Sporting Event Of The Football Season-bound New Orleans Saints. The NFL apparently claims that it holds the trademark on the phrase and is threatening some retailers who were offering “Who Dat” merchandise. Only problem? There’s a company called WhoDat Inc., and it claims to own the trademark. a-dub points us to an interview with the brothers who own WhoDat Inc., who also recorded the Who Dat song back in the 1980s. It appears the issue, from the NFL, may be with the use of a fluer de lis with the phrase, since the NFL owns the trademark on the fleur de lis in association with the Saints. But the WhoDat folks say even there the NFL is overstepping its bounds:

“Sure, a fleur de lis can belong to the Saints, but in very specific usage, and everybody knows what that is,” Monistere explained. “If you go back to 1967, to date, they have registered and used the fleur de lis in a very specific way. They put it on the Saints helmet and on the Saints ‘shield.’ Its colors are very specific — they’re ‘old gold and black.’ But for the NFL to expand that definition and say that no matter what color and what style of fleur de lis, if you put it on an item, it means Saints, it is, as many believe, is just not correct. The fleur de lis belongs to everyone including the people of New Orleans.

The Monistere brothers seem particularly annoyed by the NFL bullying small t-shirt makers, saying that they’re more than happy to grant licenses to those folks to produce Who Dat merchandise, and merchants have said that the NFL communication has been tremendously threatening and aggressive, while the Monistere’s have been quite friendly and accommodating. In fact, the Monistere’s seem particularly annoyed that the NFL is bullying small shop owners like Fleurty Girl, who received a cease-and-desist:

“Here we are going to the Superbowl for the first time in 43 years and these NFL guys are here harassing the local small businesses,” Monistere said. “Their merchandise sales are well over $320 BILLION a year! The NFL has become an intellectual property company. They make money selling their logos and image. With that kind of money coming in, they focus their attention on Fleurty Girl? I don’t have a problem with them protecting their intellectual property, but when they do it to the extent of trying to intimidate people into believing that the Fleur de lis is theirs — well, that’s just a bullying technique.”

As for the New Orleans Saints themselves? The organization there has apparently publicly said that WhoDat holds the rights on the trademark.

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Personally, I’ve had pretty good experiences in dealing with the UK press, who have interviewed me on a few different occasions. I haven’t found the experience to be particularly different than talking with the American press (or, frankly, the press from a number of other countries). I was aware that the UK press has, in general, more of a reputation for sensationalism, but in general I hadn’t seen a huge problem. However, Jake points us to a couple of blog posts from a psychology professor discussing how one of the more respected UK publications apparently made up a story, claiming an American professor’s research said something that it didn’t come close to saying, and then didn’t seem particularly interested in correcting it:

The article reported that “Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way — the so-called “princess effect.”" The Times article quotes the evolutionary psychologist at the University of California — Santa Barbara, Aaron Sell, and his findings are purportedly published in his article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, written with the two Deans of Modern Evolutionary Psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

As it turns out, however, none of this is true, as Sell explains in his angry letter to the Times. He and his coauthors do not mention blondes at all in their paper and they don’t even have hair color in their data. The supplementary analyses that Sell performed after the publication of the paper, as a personal favor to the Times reporter, show the exact opposite of what the Times article claims. After he presumably listened to Sell explain all of this on the phone, the Times reporter nonetheless made up the whole thing, and attributed it to Sell.

Reading through the actual letter from Sell is really quite damning as he details one by one all of the false statements in the Times’ article. Here’s just a snippet (it goes on and on):

Mr. Harlow called to ask me about blonde women in particular. He said he was writing an article about blondes, and that he knew of other research showing that blondes feel more entitled. _I told him that my research did not look at blondes at all._ At his request, and as a courtesy to him, I reanalyzed our unpublished data to see if there was any relationship between being blonde and any variable I measured. There was not, and I told him so. (Although we had not taken hair color in the studies, being uninterested in it, I was able to recode the data retroactively based on photographs.)

Specifically, I told him, based on our data:

Blonde women do _not_ feel more entitled.
Blonde women are _not_ more prone to anger
Blonde women do _not_ feel more attractive than other women.
Blonde women are _not_ more militaristic.
(This last analysis about militarism controls for ethnicity, a necessary control because political attitudes are correlated with ethnicity and social class. Moreover, women of European ancestry constitute essentially the only ethnic group in the sample whose members could be blonde or not, and there is _no_ relationship among them between blondeness and attitudes toward use of the military. Any analysis of “blondeness” that does not control for ethnicity on questions about political attitudes creates the possibility that one could find a spurious correlation, because women of Asian and African-American ancestry (e.g.) are never blonde. I explained this to Mr. Harlow, and explained that this means _there is no evidence in my data that blondeness causes militaristic attitudes._)

The data aside, Mr. Harlow attributes statements to me, in quotation marks, that I have never said:

I have never published, researched, thought about, or used the phrase, “Princess Effect.”
I did not refer to Southern California as the “homeland of the privileged blonde.”
I never speculated on why blondes would be less likely to be in fights (which is not true anyway).
I have no evidence whatsoever on the effects of dying one’s hair blonde.

Of course, it’s also noted that Reporters Without Borders ranks the UK higher than the US when it comes to freedom of the press, leading the professor to claim that perhaps the UK press is a little too free when it feels comfortable making such totally unsubstantiated claims.

I’d be curious if some of our UK readers could weigh in on all of this, as it does sound a bit extreme. We’re all familiar with newspapers twisting stories or getting facts wrong, but the description here seems a bit ridiculous. Also, as we well know, the UK has very strict libel laws, and it seems like outright lying could get a reporter in trouble pretty quickly, so it sounds odd and surprising that it would be done often, if at all. In the meantime, if all of this is true, it again makes me wonder about those who seem to think that a strong press is important. What they really mean is that good reporting is important, and that does not appear to be the same thing.

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It really was just about three years ago when Apple announced the iPhone and was quickly told that Cisco actually owned the trademark on the word iPhone. A lawsuit followed, but it was quickly settled with some cash changing hands and all was good. So you would think that Apple would take care of such things in advance these days. Apparently not. mrharrysan alerts us to the news that there are a few other companies with various iPad trademarks and Fujitsu in particular is claiming it has no intention of giving its name up. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that since Fujitsu only has a pending trademark (and earlier it had been considered abandoned before the company re-opened the file). Then there’s another company called Mag-Tek that does have a trademark on iPad for PIN-entry keypads, though that might not be considered competitive at all. Still, Fujitsu is posturing about how it doesn’t want to give up the name. Apple has an application in for its own trademark and is disputing Fujitsu’s right to the trademark and chances are, once again, eventually some money will change hands and forever forward the iPad name will be Apple’s to control when it comes to tablet-like devices.

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We’ve been discussing how Lord Lucas in the UK has spoken out against Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill, which would give Mandelson (and his successors or anyone he deputized) massive powers to change copyright law on a whim. Beyond that, the technology-savvy Lord Lucas has been proposing various amendments to the bill, including requiring copyright holders to detail actual damages and also a penalty for bogus copyright threats.

Another proposed amendment, as pointed out by Copycense would automatically exempt search engines from copyright law. While, for the most part, what search engines do seem to be covered by existing law (fair use, and the like), there are still some questions about whether or not the fundamental actions of search engines do or do not infringe. Clearly exempting them, however, could expand what search engines could do in some pretty impressive ways. This would also serve to negate the threats by the likes of Rupert Murdoch to remove News Corp. content from Google (since Google could then ignore any attempted block, as there would be no copyright violation).

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The Olympics are notoriously protective of the Olympic name, even trying to block the trademark application for the Olympian, a newspaper in Olympia, Washington. Paul writes in to let us know that the US Olympic Committee has now decided it’s worth suing what appears to be an almost defunct non-profit organization called The International Institute for Sport and Olympic History. Apparently the organization was set up to try to raise funds for a museum dedicated to sports, but from the article, it sounds like it has failed to get very far, and has been (perhaps) left to die already (at one point, it was reported that the Institute’s bank account contained $52). But never one to let a dead organization die peacefully, the USOC has sued and is seeking “treble damages.” What damages? This is basically a defunct organization that never did anything. The USOC says, at the very least, it deserves three times the profits the organization made off the Olympic name. Well, three times zero is zero… so seems like this one could be settled pretty quickly.

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FreshStart delivers to Google Chrome the long-overdue child of tabbed browsing and browsing sessions: tab synchronization.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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At this year’s Midem, there was still a fair bit of talk about the various “three strikes” proposals around the world that get ISPs to kick people accused (not convicted) of file sharing offline. To hear supporters tell it, the concept of “three strikes” is gaining widespread support and is really going to save the industry. Of course, the reality is quite different. Michael Geist details the state of such proposals around the globe, noting that while a few countries have implemented them, many others are rejecting them. At the same time, he highlights the high costs of implementing such proposals — without any evidence that they will actually get people to buy more music. While supporters of such proposals may think that there’s momentum behind them, if you look at the details, it seems like pretty limited support, and the plans that are in place don’t seem likely to do much other than frustrate and annoy people.

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