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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for the pear company succeeding. But what do you mean by bullying? And why does it deserve 10-100x penalty? I hazard to guess you're maybe applying emotional baggage about personal bullying to the corporate world.

This is just a trademark dispute, asserted by one, refuted by another. It happens all the time. It could be the smaller company suing the larger one even. This isn't like a patent troll leech on society case.

I'm kind of fascinated to understand what must be in your mind or experience that you think such penalties for normal legal actions are warranted.

*edited to correct as trademark dispute

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Let's not fantasise that every legal action is normal. This one certainly isn't, it's frivolous, if not legally then definitely morally. I don't know how to draw a defensible legal line separating one from the other, but this particular case would certainly be on the wrong side of it.

Apple doesn't own all the rights to all fruit in trademarks. They know it, and they know they won't win, they're just using the courts to wage a war of attrition to get what they want. This bullshit should not be possible.

What OP was describing sounds like anti-SLAPP legislation, which many states have adopted. Essentially if you file a frivolous slander/libel suit with the sole intention of harassing the target, then the other party can file a countersuit, in which the judge can throw out the case and award damages to the defending party (triple damages in CA!). It's both restitution for time and reputation lost, as well as a deterrent against targeted legal harassment.

Apple has unlimited money. They're terrorizing a mom and pop.

Apple needs to lose, and they need to pay $10-50M for torturing these poor, resourceless people.

This is so asymmetrically unfair it hurts.

They don't own every fruit.

It does make you wonder how Raspberry Pi got their logo past Apple. I can’t find anything saying there were issues on a quick search.

Maybe a pear is too closely related.

What trademark do they risk to lose in case? The pear one or the apple one? Is a pear an apple now?

And you don’t think this would result in a million more frivolous lawsuits against them?

How is it possible when Apple is the one initiating the lawsuit here?

What's good for the goose...

What exactly do you mean by that? What are you comparing?

I was just referring to the $10M penalty.

I agree that they should lose and that they should pay some kind of penalty.

I just think it shouldn’t be a lottery win for the people they filed against - they should definitely be made whole for the frivolous lawsuit - but not much more than that.

It’s worth pointing out too that the legal system clearly doesn’t consider the lawsuit frivolous.

Why is that, and why don’t we seem to care about it? Surely there are judges who have a responsibility to dismiss frivolous cases and prevent this kind of thing.

I think what the commenter is suggesting is that there’s an asymmetric cost for the parties involved. In this case, the legal costs for Apple is negligible. There’s a whole legal department whose sole job is to find and engage in cases like this. For the pear company, the cost to defend necessarily means the owners (likely) have to stop what they’re doing to work on a defence case. Apple can keep chugging along while Pear Co likely needs to drop everything and focus on this.

Just common sense laws about who pays the legal fees in cases where it is a small entity against the Goliath. Here in the Nederlands, the loser of the lawsuit pays for the legal fees of the winner. This makes sure that someone who files lawsuits that are doomed at the start will think twice about that because it will cost them a lot of money.

That's how it works in theory. I'm going on a limb here and will assume that you've never fielded or defended a lawsuit in NL. I have. Several. Yes, in theory the loser pays. But in practice the loser will rarely be ordered to pay all of your costs. The court will make some highly theoretical computation about what your lawyers have cost you, which will be a very small fraction of what they really cost you.

This theoretical amount you can then retrieve from the loser. You'll still be out the bulk of your legal fees.

> Here in the Nederlands, the loser of the lawsuit pays for the legal fees of the winner.

In all cases I've seen first hand (in the Netherlands) the judge ordered all parties to pay their own costs. Loser pays is not a default because you almost never "win a 100%". You win for something like 70% (or maybe 90% if your lucky). So unless the case was really frivolous you will still have to pay for it yourself.

I personally know 2 people who sued the Dutch state (a somewhat similarly Goliath) and won. Both still needed to pay their own legal fees and such. It is possible to start a new case to get your legal fees from the opposing side. However if you have just concluded 5 years of court against a Goliath-style adversary your probably not really motivated for "a second round".

Also having to pay afterwards is no deterrent for a party like Apple who has unlimited money. You will have to pay lawyers and such up front for a case that can potentially drag on for years and years.

That’s not really how it works in the Netherlands, I’m afraid. Yes, the losing party usually has to pay the legal fees, but these fees are determined using a point-based system and do not really reflect the actual costs.

But, I do have to say, IP-related cases are an exception, and more is covered there (still not necessarily the actual costs). But that is not specific to the Netherlands but mandated by an EU directive (2004/48/EG).

It could work the other way too? Where the small company loses they must now pay the fees of the larger company. Nobody can afford to defend themselves against the large company because they might have to pay the large companies fees

I don’t know how the Dutch handle it, but it’s likely similar to germany: The lawyer and court fees are set by the “value” of the lawsuit (Streitwert) which in this case would be the alleged damages. The court can set that value. There’s tables to derive the fees. Now, each party can voluntarily choose to pay more to their legal team, but the fee that the loosing party needs to pay is limited to the court mandated fees.

Do you spell it the "Nederlands" or was that a typo?

In the Netherlands you spell it Nederland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands so it may well be a native speaker mixing up the spellings.

since in dutch you call the country Nederland it's not a big mistake to call it The Nederlands

I didn't say it was a mistake. Why does everyone read everything I write in bad faith!?

> or was that a typo?

Typos are mistakes.

Thanks Webster

This isn't a copyright dispute, this is a challenged trademark. This is not a lawsuit, it's an administrative opposition.

A different set of laws, policies, and procedures are in play here.

> I'm kind of fascinated to understand what must be in your mind or experience that you think such penalties for normal legal actions are warranted.

Please don't cross-examine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It’s not about what’s in his mind, it’s about what’s not in it, that is sophisticated legal knowledge or experience in healthy and normal legal disputes. Typically, these people want to push extreme or even infinite punishment for mundane things that personally annoy them or feed into some narrative they have.

Large companies win without a fight because the legal costs are easily assumed by them, but are devastating to smaller businesses. Wealth usually wins by default because smaller companies can’t afford the fight. Surely that’s easy to understand?

If you think this is all “working as intended”... well... that’s unfortunate and I think the vast majority of people would disagree.

“Wealth usually wins by default” is fully “as intended”, according to Noam Chomsky.

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