Last fall, we wrote about Entrepreneur Magazine's ridiculous attempt to get an entrepreneur/writer/speaker who was pitching to use the name "entrepreneurology.com" to give up the domain. Trademarking the word "entrepreneur" seems particularly ridiculous, and BusinessWeek recently ran an excellent article detailing Entrepreneur Magazine's history of suing entrepreneurs for using the word entrepreneur. It also, amusingly if somewhat tangentially, delves into the history of Entrepreneur Magazine's founder (who is no longer associated with the magazine), who was arrested at one point in his career for robbing banks. Entrepreneur Magazine and its lawyers were not all that happy to cooperate with BusinessWeek on the profile, noting that they didn't want to help a competitor, and also pointing to trademark lawsuits from BusinessWeek's parent company Bloomberg.

Either way, it does appear, tragically and ridiculously, that Entrepreneur Magazine has won some of these previous lawsuits against other entrepreneurs. However, the creator of Entrepreneurology took the initiative and sued for declaratory judgment after receiving his cease-and-desist letter from Entrepreneur Magazine -- and is trying to invalidate the trademark, claiming the word is generic and not at all associated with the magazine. Entrepreneur Magazine vehemently denies this, of course, but as BusinessWeek points out, the magazine's own legal fights have argued otherwise at times:

In the litigious precincts of intellectual property, the aggressor inevitably finds itself chasing its own tail—and EMI and its lawyers have actually tried to use the "generic" argument to their advantage. In 2008, Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four accounting firms, sued EMI in federal court in New York, alleging that the publisher violated its trademark for an Entrepreneur of the Year award. The dispute over the prize dates to 1994, when Ernst first sent EMI a cease-and-desist missive aimed at Entrepreneur's similarly named award. EMI fired back in a lawsuit in California that Ernst's award trademark cannot be infringed because "entrepreneur of the year" is a generic term. In the end, Ernst and EMI settled their differences confidentially and out of court. EMI changed its award name slightly (nominations for "Entrepreneur Magazine's Entrepreneur of 2011" are now open), while Ernst is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its trademarked Entrepreneur of the Year program.

Oh, and you may note one other oddity in the paragraph above. Entrepreneur Media Inc., refers to itself as EMI. You have to wonder how it's never been sued by the record label EMI, with which there could be actual confusion.

We recently had a story about how the makers of iFlow Reader, an ebook reader for Apple devices, was forced to close up shop, after Apple changed the way things worked with in-app content purchases, meaning that it was impossible for iFlow to make money on Apple's platform. At the time, we pointed out how dangerous it is to rely on a single platform provider for any business, and we're still amazed that any company does that. And yet, we've seen similar things for years. Numerous companies rely entirely on one big company for pretty much everything about their business -- from Google to Facebook to Microsoft to Twitter to Apple, there are stories of all sorts of companies who pretty much could be wiped out in a single move if the larger companies changed certain terms.

I'm constantly amazed at how many companies fail to recognize this, and build business models that rely entirely on a third party. This goes beyond just software companies, as well. We see it with content creators who rely on a single provider/partner as well, rather than recognize that success comes from building a sustainable model that doesn't rely on a single provider.

A few weeks ago, in response to some questions about Twitter's recent changes, which appeared to screw with developers who relied on Twitter as a platform, Twitter investor Fred Wilson told a conference audience: "Don't be a Google bitch, don't be a Facebook bitch, and don't be a Twitter bitch. Be your own bitch." Add to that a statement from a day or so later from Google's Eric Schmidt, in which he noted that if you want to be rich, you should build your own platform on which others build, rather than relying on others, and there's a bit of an important pattern to recognize here. Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't build on others' platforms -- everyone builds off of someone's platform, but the question is: who are you reliant on going forward?