Every parent wants to encourage their kid's natural interests, but there are a ton of other influences in the lives of little kids -- like toy makers and advertisers. It can be difficult to find purely educational toys that aren't trying to peddle a bunch of other stuff. For parents of little girls, the toy aisles seem particularly loaded with questionable themes. Here are just a few examples.

• Lego Friends is a line of toys aimed at girls that are reinforcing some stereotypes. Lego is trying to expand beyond its traditional customers of little boys, and the company has done a lot of research to try to create a toy that girls want to play with. [url]
• Gwen Thompson is an American Doll introduced in 2009 -- as the world's first "homeless" doll. Gwen was a limited edition doll (sold for $95), and hopefully she isn't living on the streets anymore. [url]
• Chemistry sets have changed a lot over the years (mainly to make them boring safer), and a few of them are now geared exclusively for girls. Some parents are offended by "science kits" that are basically advertisements for cosmetics and perfume, but there are a lot of toys that are simply advertisements for other products.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

There are plenty of marketing gurus who will advise company founders to choose names and logos very carefully -- making sure to avoid confusing names or names without the appropriate gravitas. Then again, there are several companies with names that break the rules.

• If you're starting a new company, and you need a name (other than some silly placeholder like NewCo), read through this article to avoid some obvious pitfalls. Digg is a great name -- but execution matters, too. [url]
• The Name Inspector gives his advice on company names -- and debunks some common naming myths. He also analyzes a few familiar company names (eg Apple) -- and hates the branding term "empty vessel" because he thinks it's silly. [url]
• If you've ever wondered how some big company got its name, here are a few examples. Lego means "I put together" in Latin, but the company says that's only a coincidence. [url]
• To discover more interesting business-related content, check out what the deal is on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Technology has come a long way in the last few decades. Just about every computer (or smartphone) we use now is vastly more powerful than the primitive electronics that helped put astronauts on the surface of the moon. Gadgets are getting so cheap that toys are becoming impressively advanced. Here are just a few examples.

• Imagine a remote-controlled robot spider that shoots projectiles and wears explosive plastic armor. Help name this toy here. [url]
• Kids used to play with everyday objects and use their "imagination" to interact with simple toys. Now there are "augmented reality platforms" -- so kids don't need to use their imaginations anymore. [url]
• The Kackel Dackel is a crappy German toy. What kid wouldn't want to clean up the plastic pooh that came out of a toy dog? [url]
• Satoshi Furukawa took 2 hours out of his busy day on the International Space Station (ISS) to build a Lego replica of the ISS. They just completely ignored the second rule of making scale models. Do not nest. [url]
• To find some more bizarre/cool stuff, check out some things that other StumbleUpon users have found. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

There are a lot of new toys out for this holiday season. There's still some time to shop for some cool toys, and here are just a few examples of toys that are expanding their markets into other uses and demographics.

• Lego topped $1 billion in sales in the US in 2010, but it's only now starting to seriously target girls who are 5yo and up. It won't just be pink plastic this time. [url]
• Toy helicopters are becoming pretty advanced, so it's not too surprising to see added hacks to make them more useful. Spending $15,000 to modify an RC helicopter for professional videography goes way beyond most toy budgets, though. [url]
• Normally, Nerf toys are pretty safe and squishy, but apparently, they can be used to extract teeth, too. Will it hurt? Not if used on already-loose primary teeth. [url]
• To discover more interesting business-related content, check out what the deal is on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

More and more robots are learning new tricks every day. In the not-too-distant future, everyone could be playing and working with robots all the time. Here are some interesting videos of robots demonstrating cool motor skills.

• This throwable robot that magnetically sticks to walls is designed as a recon scout to fight pirates at sea. But if a ship's hull isn't magnetic, this little remote-controlled bot just drowns in the ocean... [url]
• If you want to make really small paper airplanes, there's a bot for that. FYI, these remote-controlled robot hands can also do things besides origami -- like heart surgery. [url]
• A robot made from Lego can sort different colored Lego bricks at a rate of about 48 per minute. This looks like an early version of a Lego digestive tract -- which may eventually be part of a Lego artificial life form.... [url]
• To discover more interesting robot-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Robots are incredibly useful machines that are becoming more and more important for everyone. Kids are building them. Robots are building more robots. Pretty soon, we'll be surrounded by robots... oh sorry Roomba, we already are. Here are some cool videos and some examples of robots that are helping us out (and not trying to enslave us).

• Watch a solid block of aluminum get carved into a racing helmet by a fancy robotic drill. Injection molding is so 20th century. [url]
• Protei is an autonomous sailing robot that will try to remove surface oil pollution from the ocean -- aiming to help out cleaning up the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. This Kickstarter project has been funded with over $30,000 to build a full scale prototype. [url]
• The Landroids is a team of kids who like to build Lego robots -- and offer encouragement to other kids who might enter the Google Science Fair. And they put in 20-30 hours per week on their robot-building projects! [url]
• The next robot to go to Mars is called Curiosity, and it's pretty big -- about twice as long as the previous Mars rovers. Hopefully, Curiosity won't kill cats aliens on Mars... [url]
• To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

For many years now, we've covered Lego's quixotic quest to "trademark" its famous brick design. It hasn't gone well. Back in 2005, we wrote about how Canada rejected a trademark claim it made against a competitor, MegaBlok. But Lego didn't stop there, and tried to go after Mega Blok in Europe. In 2008, it lost in Europe as well. Rather than recognize the situation and focus on actually competing in the marketplace, Lego kept appealing. However, SteelWolf points us to the news that the European Court of Justice has upheld that 2008 ruling, meaning, once again, Lego has been told you can't trademark interconnecting bricks. And to think, all that time, Lego's lawyers could have just been building something cool. In the meantime, it still seems silly that the company was so focused on this. It has built up a strong fan base, and a great brand, without having to resort to trademark tricks to eliminate competitors.

Tom Kintop was the first of a few of you to send in the news that LEGO, makers of the plastic bricks -- and rather well known for its overly aggressive intellectual property enforcement attempts, which often get shot down -- has sued a small non-profit organization in Minneapolis called Project Legos, where the Legos stands for Leadership, Empowerment, Growth, Opportunity, Sustainability. While both are targeted at children, it's hard to see that the two compete in any way in the same "market." It's difficult to see how there's any confusion here, or how it does LEGO any good suing a small charitable organization. They should send over some LEGO bricks and apologize.

We recently wrote about the ridiculous job for lawyers making sure no unauthorized brands appear in a movie -- which doesn't have much of a legal basis. But, for some reason, companies back down on that sort of stuff all the time. The latest example involves the classic mockumentary band Spinal Tap, who is putting out a new DVD, where they thought (correctly) that it would be cool to include a fan-made video of one of their "hits," "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight." The video was made by a then 14-year-old and was a stop-action video involving a lego version of the band and its fans: Now, from Spinal Tap's point of view, this is a very cool way of connecting with fans: making use of a cool video in their DVD. In fact, they even played it up, and during a live performance where the video was shown, got real-life fans to mimic the lego fans, by holding their hands in the infamous "C" position of the plastic lego figures. But, of course, the lawyers got in the way. Lego objected to some of the words in the song and denied the use of the video on the DVD (oddly, the DVD still shows the fans with their hands, though it no longer makes any sense). But the real question is why Lego was even consulted. As Kimberley Isbell notes, Lego doesn't seem to have a legal leg to stand on here:

Lego justified its stance by citing the "commercial" nature of the Spinal Tap video.  But can Lego really prohibit the use of their products in commercial videos?  If you ask the federal courts, the answer is likely "no." It's a lesson that Mattel has repeatedly had to learn the hard way.

But that hasn't stopped trademark and copyright owners from trying. The court summarily rejected Wham-O's claims against Paramount Pictures for the unflattering use of its Slip 'N Slide toy in the movie "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star." Caterpillar likewise had its claims against Walt Disney (relating to the portrayal of the brand in the oh-so-popular movie "George of the Jungle 2") shot down. Similar claims by Emerson Electric Co. (makers of the In-Sink-Erator garbage disposal) and the Canadian folk band the Wyrd Sisters also failed to go anywhere.

But, unfortunately, the people putting together the Spinal Tap DVD did, in fact, cave in, and the video has not been included.

Back in 2005, we wrote about a Canadian Supreme Court decisions that cleared Montreal company Mega Brands from charges of trademark violations for creating Mega Bloks as a competitor to Lego's well known interconnecting blocks. For years, Lego owned patents on its blocks, but those patents expired and, as has been known to happen, competitors entered the space. Lego, of course, decided that rather than compete on the merits, it would continue to try to avoid market competition through the use of trademark and copyright law. Despite losing in Canada, the company still pushed its trademark claims in Europe -- but a European court has now sided with Mega Brands as well, in noting that no trademark should be allowed on the concept of interconnecting blocks.

It's quite likely that Lego will appeal this decision, as the company has quite the reputation for being overly aggressive when it comes to protecting its offerings. However, hopefully the company will realize that actually competing in the marketplace isn't such a bad thing sometimes.