Bonn café stands up to Apple over trademark | Hacker News Reader

Bonn café stands up to Apple over trademark

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41 pointsdenysonique14 comments

What this article fails to state is that its not about the "Apple" trademark. Apple holds the trademark for "Apple Cafe" (background: http://blog.guifx.com/2009/06/03/the-apple-store-that-almost...) in the corresponding category that the Apfelkind cafe is applying for (afaik something like "entertainment and consumption"). So its not as arbitrary as some try to put it. Whether the practice of holding to trademarks forever by enforcing them makes sense is a different story.

Don’t you have to use a trademark if you want to keep it or am I thinking of something else?

You have to enforce it, which is why companies are so aggressive with trademarks. Patents are a different story.

That’s not what I mean. Here is what the Wikpedia article about trademarks says: “Trademarks rights must be maintained through actual lawful use of the trademark. These rights will cease if a mark is not actively used for a period of time, normally 5 years in most jurisdictions.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights)

I’m not sure whether or how this applies to this case.

Yes you do. But thats US law, your mileage may vary in Germany...

Trademark law is international. Whatever the intention of the law is, the usual scheme is that you just have to enforce it and mention it from time to time. Thats why you can sometimes buy "Raider" instead of "Twix".

In addition to that, everyone here should know how corporate lawyers are: shoot first, ask later - nothing special.

I'm pretty sure the United States Congress can't just pass laws and expect them to be enforceable internationally.

However, there seems to be quite a bit of parity between US law and European laws with regard to "intellectual property" laws. AFAIK, Apple, Inc does not own their trademark in the business of cafés. I'd generally spout about protecting one's trademarks, but in this case, my opinion is that they've stepped outside of the area where it's even questionable whether they have a case. I'd bet they don't.

They don't have a case, but they're not trying to make one. They have to make a show of responding to demonstrate that they'll defend their mark by issuing the letter and filing the objection. If they don't, then when their mark is threatened with genuine infringement, the infringer can point to all those other cases involving logos containing apples and say 'you never complained about those, and my logo depicting an apple is not all that different.'

What will happen is the Munich PTO will look at it, itemize the differences between the two trademarks, and then (probably) grant the Apfelcafe its trademark. Apfelcafe will do the same thing in the future is someone opens (say) an Apfelkindergarten. If you don't have a record of proactively defending your trademark against possible infringement, then you can lose your claim upon it.

How is claiming trademark and being conclusively rejected hy the court give greater weight to a future trademark claim than saying nothing at all? That is the opposite of logical.

I think it's due to the two sides of the argument - one is that the proposed trademark is infringing, the other is that the current trademark is being used. Defending it in court every time is a way of supporting the 2nd side of the argument, not necessarily the first.

There is no question that there will be any genuine consumer confusion in this case. Apple are trying to extend the trademark beyond the bounds of propriety.

However, the limited contact I've had with German trademark law suggests that Apple may win in their efforts to ruin this small delightfully styled business. German trademark law appears to be extremely broken.

Article with photo of logo: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/26/german-family-owne...

The site itself: http://apfel-kind.de/

tl;dr:

Bonn café stands up to Apple over trademark

(No, really, the article has almost zero information besides a picture of the logo of the café.)

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