Speaking of flip-flops, have you heard the latest about that blatant lawsuit-waiting-to-happen iPod shuffle carbon copy, LUXPRO's "Super shuffle"? It's hard to get a fix on this company: two weeks ago, LUXPRO looked like an unusually unimaginative Asian manufacturing company with a poor grasp of trade dress law and an irrational non-fear of lawyers; one week ago, it looked more like a scheming pack of Evil Masterminds™ who never intended to ship the Super shuffle as an actual product and only created a prototype for the massive publicity they knew it'd bring them. But now we're starting to lean back the other way again-- because the Super shuffle hasn't so much vanished from the LUXPRO site (the way a publicity-grabbing vaporware product would) as it has morphed ever-so-slightly into something far more craven and cowardly.

Check it out: Engadget notes that if you load up the original URL, what used to be the Super shuffle page over at the LUXPRO site is now pimping the "Super Tangent" instead. The specs are, unsurprisingly, completely identical to those of the erstwhile Super shuffle, but the Tangent boasts a radically different industrial design-- and by "radically different," we mean it's still the exact same carbon-copy ripoff of an iPod shuffle, except that now it comes in black and red as well as white and the buttons have had little divots chunked out of them in a transparent effort to stave off a lawsuit. Oh, and the words "SUPER SHUFFLE" on the back have been replaced with "Super Tangent." (At one point, apparently the product was called the "Super Shiner," instead, because that's what showed up printed on its back.)

Now, when we say that LUXPRO has made these design changes, we should probably clarify that slightly, because all the "photos" of the Super Tangent are obvious Photoshop mock-ups (and godawful poor ones at that, we might add). And that implies one of two scenarios. The first is that LUXPRO really did plan to copy the iPod shuffle's design-- and even its name-- wholesale, and was either too stupid or too brazen to realize that it'd get chewed into a stringy pulp by a grinning pack of Apple lawyers, so when the legal ramifications were finally made clear, it decided to alter its purloined design just enough to stay out of hot water. As we noted before, the only person claiming to have firsthand knowledge that "it was just a brilliant publicity stunt" was Jack Campbell, who has, historically speaking, not exactly been a Burbling Fountain of Truth.

The other possibility is that Jack was right, the Super shuffle was indeed intended solely as a publicity stunt, and the company saw so much customer interest in its nonexistent product that now it's trying to produce something as close as possible without stepping on Apple's legal toes. But whatever LUXPRO's original intentions, we've got some advice for LUXPRO's incompetent Photoshop jockey. First, take a class or something, because right now even the Weekly World News would balk at publishing one of your mockups as an "unretouched photo." And second, when it comes to changing the Super shuffle's design, keep going-- don't stop now. We aren't exactly experts on international intellectual property law, but we strongly suspect that there isn't a court in this half of the galaxy that wouldn't find the Super Tangent's current design as pictured to be a trade dress infraction likely to dilute Apple's brand and cause customer confusion.

Actually, you know what? On second thought, don't change a thing. We could use yet another Apple lawsuit around here, especially one so likely to provide a constant stream of comic relief.