228
Apple could force a 111-year-old fruit company to change its apple logo
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
228 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37747 readers
428 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This reminds me of the Big Mac decision. I can't remember where but there was a burger place that had a Big Mac burger but the name was not a copy of the McDonalds one, it was iirc because the owner's name was Mac. Anyway, they lost the case and therefore lost copyright protection on Big Mac, so Hungry Jacks/Burger King started renaming all their burgers to something something big Mac, just to mess with them. Maybe Apple will bite of more than they can chew and end up losing protection for the Apple logo or similar things.
It was an Irish restaurant called Supermacs.
McDonald's is notorious for suing any food-related company with a name starting with Mc or Mac, for trademark infringement. McDonald's lost to McNally's, a steakhouse in California, but I have to assume they've won enough to persist the policy.
Although in the 2010s it was observed that copyright lawyers on retainer to movie studios and record companies were over-eager to report infringement to media platforms even when it was obviously unintentional and not useful for piracy (e.g. dancing baby videos.) And Disney has a long wretched tradition of suing daycare places for wall murals long before the internet.
So this might be a matter of retained legal teams keeping themselves busy with overvigilence, since overenforcement makes such companies look like abusive dicks who deserve to be pirated (or worse, deserve to be not pirated).