A British judge ruled Wednesday that Apple must run ads in U.K. newspapers saying that Samsung Electronics didn’t copy designs for its iPad – the jurisprudential equivalent of ordering a pupil to write “I will not engage in spurious patent battles” on the blackboard 10,000 times. But new research on online ad campaigns on Yahoo suggests the punishment the judge doled out might help Apple more than hurt it. To get a sense of how consumers respond to online ads, economists Randall Lewis and Dan Nguyen looked at days when Yahoo had sold the main ad on its front page as a split, with two different ads alternating throughout the day. Then they looked at how differences in the ads consumers happened to see affected subsequent Internet search behavior. Read the full story at the Wall Street Journal.