Not as unique as it should be, according to Unique Photo Inc., the Fairfield photography retailer, which has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Newark accusing an online photographic equipment supplier of violating the store’s “Unique” trademark.

The suit accuses South Orange-based Unique Photo Deals, which operated a website called UniquePhotoDealsUSA.com and a store on Amazon.com, of being “engaged in counterfeiting and infringing” the Fairfield’s store’s “Unique” trademarks, three of which have been registered since 1997.

The suit says the alleged counterfeiter agreed to cease using the name in February, stopped operating the Amazon site and relinquished the UniquePhotoDealsUSA.com Web address to Unique Photo. But the South Orange company then continued to use the Unique Photo Deals USA name selling elsewhere.

The trademark used by the South Orange company is “substantially indistinguishable” from the Fairfield company’s trademark, and that is “likely to cause confusion” and deceive customers, the suit says.

The euphoria among development executives at a forum this week on corporate tax breaks did not preclude the odd shot at some familiar political targets.

One jab focused on the administration of former Gov. Jon Corzine, which conceived one of the largest existing incentive programs – the Urban Transit Hub Tax Credit program – and included several alumni of Goldman Sachs.

Speaker Ted Zangari, a Newark development attorney, said industry insiders early on saw flaws in the program, which gave breaks worth tens of millions of dollars based on investment, while requiring little in the way of job creation or retention.

“It was sort of odd that the real estate community was giving a lecture to the Goldman Sachs folks who were running the prior administration,” he said. “But it never really seemed to make a lot of sense that you would reward a company for the amount of money it was spending.”

That said, few — if any — executives publicly complained over the years, as the program awarded tax breaks totaling more than $1 billion.

Few subjects upset business leaders more than state requirements that companies pay the prevailing (usually union-level) wage rate on state-funded construction projects. Yet a couple of real estate executives at a breakfast forum on a pending legislative overhaul of state incentive programs sounded downright conciliatory on the issue.

Ted Zangari, a development attorney who founded the Smart Growth Economic Development Coalition, a group of 22 business and industry organizations, said the state’s prevailing-wage requirements — which would be unchanged in the overhaul — aren’t so bad.

“The reality is, these incentives are generous enough, and the prevailing wage on balance is not so onerous a requirement” to keep developers from coming out OK, Zangari said at the forum Tuesday in New Brunswick. “Despite all the hysteria out there about prevailing wage, we have not found it to be a big impediment.”

Gil Medina, executive vice president of CBRE Group Inc., agreed with Zangari, sparking a ripple of laughter when he joked that it’s “kind of like what Mark Twain said about [classical composer Richard] Wagner’s music: It’s not as bad as it sounds.”