Apple Is Taking Legal Action Against a Small Company Because of Its Logo

It might be an thing for US companies, Apple is certainly not alone.

For instance Wendy's sued a local snackbar here in the Netherlands called "Wendy's". Same here, they somehow expected to win because they're big? [0]

[0]: https://www.volkskrant.nl/economie/zelfs-wendy-s-krijgt-wend... (Archive link: http://archive.is/oiFWv)

> Other ridiculous examples:

Actually I can see the relevance here, especially for that first case.

But as others probably mentioned already, if you don't actively defend your trademark it becomes void and you actually lose it. They don't do it for profit, as this actually costs them money. They rather don't really have any other option than doing that. Well, run the risk of losing the trademark of course. However the case with the pear confuses me, too ...

IANAL, but in general there are two reasons for things like this.

1 - Preventing trademark erosion. Companies have a duty to be proactive and continually challenge trademark infringements. If not, the trademark can become invalid. e.g. this happened with Sony's Walkman (TM).

However, they don't seem to have good grounds for it in this case. They are dissimilar enough (both in visual style and domain) that no reasonable consumer would get confused.

2 - Over-eagerness from the legal department. [Speculation, may not apply to Apple.] Pressure to get billables, to prove individual relevance, or even just busywork can -- in the absence of clear guidelines and policy -- lead to the legal dept taking unnecessary action. This becomes more true the more silo'd the different departments in a company are.

I believe this is a natural thing for big companies to evolve into, which can be addressed amongst other things through SOP's, guidelines, oversight (i.e. more people signing off).

Suffice to say that your average conglomerate cease and desist has not passed the desk of the CEO.

Preferably something that doesn’t look like a side view of your crotch on STDs.

> I'm all for calling out big companies when they do crappy things, but you have to be seen to defend your trademarks & the system to allow businesses to contest trademark applications is there for a reason.

I always see this "defense" when big corporations abuse small companies by frivolous lawsuits... but with this you're actually saying that there's a chance someone will mix up a fruit logo of that small company with Apple's which is ridiculous. Especially since they don't share the market.

Please don't defend abusive corporations with this :/

Apple is not “required” to enforce its mark in every instance or risk losing it. The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited. Genericide occurs when a trademark becomes the standard term for a type of good (‘zipper’ and ‘escalator’ being two famous examples). This is very rare and would not be a problem for Apple unless people start saying “Apple” simply to mean “smart device.” Courts also set a very high bar to show abandonment (usually years of total non-use). Importantly, failure to enforce a mark against every potential infringer does not show abandonment

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...