Guinness led to a scandal and criminal trial concerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case "Guinness plc v Saunders", in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid. In the 1980s, as the IRA's bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the harp as its logo. The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo.
Moseley v. V Secret Catalogue, Inc. that is similar to a trademark and causes an erosion of its uniqueness. Starting in 1946, various states began to adopt anti-dilution provisions in their trademark statutes. The federal government followed suit in 1995 with the Federal Trademark Dilution Act (FTDA). This federal legislation applied to famous marks and made a party liable if it used a similar mark that diluted a famous mark's distinctiveness. However, the legislation did not define terms to establish what constituted a famous mark or articulate a clear standard for determining liability. As a result, as trademark cases were litigated in federal courts, a split