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.
Trademark required to pay treble damages and attorney's fees in a trademark infringement case as it demonstrates that the trademark user performed due diligence and was using the mark in good faith. The USPTO internally captures more information about trademarks than what they publicly disclose on their official search website, such as the complete contents of every logo trademark filing. Trademarks may also be searched on third-party databases such as LexisNexis, Dialog, and CompuMark. Within the European Union, searches have to be conducted taking into account both EU Trademarks as well as national trademarks. Classification systems exist to help in searching