Apple has always been rather aggressive when it comes to managing its intellectual property and trademarks. In recent years, Apple has embarked on something of a trademark quest. According to a report by the Tech Transparency Project, Apple has registered more trademarks than Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Google combined. However, it seems to have reached the ultimate level with the action the American brand has just taken against Switzerland’s oldest and largest fruit farmers’ organization, a 111-year-old organization, to force it to change its logo.
When you see the Swiss company’s logo, it’s hard to understand how it could infringe the American brand. Unless you want to register the general use of the apple…which could pose a number of problems in the future if, unfortunately, the courts were to rule in Apple’s favor. This is what worries Jimmy Mariéthoz, director of the Union des Fruits Suisses: ” Their objective here is really to own the rights to a real apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal… which should be free for everyone.
This move is not anecdotal, as it follows similar requests made to various authorities around the world, with varying degrees of success. Apple’s quest to own the intellectual property rights to something as generic as fruit is truly alarming.
Apple: the Orwellian spirit applied right down to the logo
In recent years, Apple has sued a meal preparation application with a pear logo, a songwriter named Frankie Pineapple, a German bicycle path, a stationery store called PapperApple and a few others. All these actions are brought to bear with Apple’s financial firepower on much smaller organizations, which often prefer to stop proceedings before finding themselves ruined by legal costs. A great paradox for a company that denounced the Orwellian world in 1984 to launch its flagship product…
