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Comment by colejohnson66 | Hacker News Reader

Trademarks, unlike copyright, are "use and protect it or lose it". There's no "expiry" date on them like copyrighted things have because brands sometimes live for over a hundred years. Letting someone take your companies name and logo just because you're "too old" isn't fair. This is because trademarks, unlike copyright, aren't about science and innovation; they're about preventing consumer confusion.

Not protecting your trademarks can cause them to become "genericized". Wikipedia has a list of many that you've probably heard of and had no idea they were once trademarked.[0]

Some lawyer at Apple probably caught wind of this Swedish company and took action. It's really that simple.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

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Trademarks are limited to the trades (i.e. 'goods& services') listed in the trademark application. Apple, Inc doesn't sell apples. Nor do they have apple farms. Visit USPTO's TESS and search for serial number 87628828. The "Goods and Services" field contains no mention of fruit, farms, or produce.

You must diligently protect your trademark against uses by others in similar markets. I would hope that protecting your computing business against apple farmers would get you, at a minimum, a frown and a "no" from a judge or the enforcing agency.

That is true. That argument also got Apple Records off Apple's back in the old days; they weren't in the music business (until they did with iTunes and were sued again). I think the lawyers are being too ambitious with this lawsuit, and will lose, but my comment was just clarifying why lawyers would bring such a case.

Lawyers get paid regardless of the outcome.

Is on their best interest to bring as many frivolous loosing lawsuits as Apple is willing to pay for.

Corporate lawyers also get paid whether they file lawsuits or not, so no, it's not really in their interests to file frivolous lawsuits.

People keep themselves busy (or soon they're out of their job). When there's no high or medium priority studs to do, people move to the low priority and do it, even if useless.

There’s no lawsuit though. The article is literally about an application for trademark registration Apple filed in 2017 and a now subsequent appeal of the specific portions of that application which were denied and a hypothetical by an interested third party that too broad a grant might cause conflict in the future.

The way you describe it is a myth. Half of the 'genericized' products were done so as a concession of WW1 or the company willfully choosing something overly generic for royalties or poor circumstances (flip phone, videotape, respectively). The rest expired, were caught in disputes with other companies, or occurred before expansions of copyright law.

You'll notice the rest of the page is legally protected trademarks that have NOT expired, despite common and generic use by individuals. Hoover did not lose their brand, nor Kleenex.

So what you're saying is that Apple is infringing on this Swiss company's trademark and must be forced to change their logo before logos with apples are irreversibly associated with Apple instead of the Swiss company?

No kidding. I'd love to see the bigger company loose their logo in one of these petty trademark disputes someday.

It happened when McDonalds tried to trademark Mc in the European Union. They lost out to Irish company Supermacs.

This is not what happened, they had the trademark for "Big Mac". They took Supermac's to court because their name was too similar, and ended up losing the trademark.

For a while Burger King Sweden was selling burgers using the name, apparently the "Anything But a Big Mac", "Burger Big Mac Wished it Was", etc.

Sadly they're still called McDonalds here.

Losing a trademark just means that it's not protected, and anyone can use it. Burger King Sweden was directly making fun of the Big Mac in their menu for a while after this case, since they could do it legally.

We're talking about "apple" though, Apple the company didn't invent the word "apple" nor the shape of the fruit

>Some lawyer at Apple probably caught wind of this Swedish company and took action. It's really that simple.

It's not even that. There's no action being taken here other than Apple appealing the provisional denial of a trademark registration for the Apple Records logo in the trade domain of music and related multi media. The Swiss government approved one of two logos, and Apple is trying to get the other approved. That's it. No "action" against any Swiss companies. Every bit of the article talking about Apple conflicting with the fruit union is 100% hypothetical speculation.

I was just meaning if there was a reason why articles exclude the logos in question but I suppose this reply generated its own comment chain :p

> There's no "expiry" date on them like copyrighted things

Federal trademarks expire after 10 years and you have to renew them or lose them.

>Some lawyer at Apple probably caught wind of this Swedish company and took action.

SWISS company.

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