The company has taken on singer-songwriters, school districts, and food blogs for trying to trademark or logos featuring an apple, pear, or pineapple.
Ryan Mack reported from Los Angeles and Kellen Browning from San Francisco.
March 11, 2022
When Genevieve St. John started blogging about sex and life in 2019, she designed a neon green and pink apple logo for the business that was cut open to resemble female genitalia.
Shortly after filing a logo application with the US Patent and Trademark Office that same year, Ms. St. John received a nasty surprise. Her request was disputed by Apple.
In a 246-page objection, lawyers for the iPhone maker wrote that Ms. St. John’s logo “is likely to tarnish Apple’s reputation, which Apple cultivates in part by trying not to associate itself with sexually explicit or pornographic material.”
Ms. St. John, 41, a human resources specialist from Chandler, Arizona, was dejected. With no money to hire a lawyer and take on the tech giant, she decided not to answer Apple’s challenge. This set the stage for a default decision in favor of the electronics giant.
“I didn’t even make money from it,” Ms. St. John said of her blog, which she has put on hold. “But this is Apple and I’m not going to argue with them because I don’t have a million dollars.”
Ms. St. John is one of dozens of entrepreneurs, small businesses and corporations that Apple has targeted in recent years for using the word “apple” or fruit logos on stems in trademark names. Between 2019 and last year, Apple, the world’s most valuable public company worth $2.6 trillion, filed 215 trademark objections to protect its logo, name, or product names, according to the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project. That’s more than the roughly 136 trademark objections that Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google filed together in the same period, the group said.
Apple is a more common word than corporate names like Microsoft or Google, and this is partly due to the high rate. Many copycats, especially in China, have also tried to use the Apple name or logo in tech and entertainment to make money.
But Apple has often targeted objects that have nothing to do with technology or are infinitesimal in size. He even took aim at logos featuring other fruits such as oranges and pears.
His careers have included an Indian food blog, the Department of Energy, the Wisconsin School District, and Mattel, which makes the popular Apples to Apples card game. Apple also objected to the orange logo used by startup Citrus. Last year, the company settled a dispute with a meal planning app called Prepear after the app’s creator agreed to change the pear logo’s leaf to look less like Apple.
The scope of the company’s campaign comes down to “scare tactics that Apple doesn’t need to protect the public from confusion,” said Christine Farley, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.
Citrus; Department of Energy; Super Healthy Kids, the company behind Prepear; and the Patent and Trademark Office declined to comment. Mattel did not respond to requests for comment.
Josh Rosenstock, an Apple spokesman, said the law “requires” the company to defend its trademarks by filing objections with the Patent and Trademark Office if there are concerns about new trademark applications.
“When we see applications that are too broad or that might confuse our customers, our first step is always to contact them and try to resolve them quickly and amicably,” he said. “Legal action is always our last resort.”
Apple files trademark objections against organizations that have already received logo or name approval from the Patent and Trademark Office. In these objections, the company argued that “Apple’s trademarks are so well-known and easily recognizable” that other trademarks would weaken its brand strength or lead “ordinary consumers to believe that the applicant is affiliated with, affiliated with, or supported by it.” ”
Some of those affected said that while they were convinced that their trademarks did not infringe Apple’s domain, they could not show that the claims were unfounded because they did not have the resources to fight the company before the Complaint Review Board. trademarks. Between 2019 and 2021, 37 entities, or about 17 percent of those opposed by Apple or its subsidiary Beats Electronics, withdrew their trademark applications. According to the Tech Transparency Project, another 127 people or organizations, or 59 percent, did not answer the calls and defaulted.
Stephanie Carlisi, an independent singer-songwriter, said she was shocked when Apple took issue with the trademark of her stage name, Frankie Pineapple, in 2020. In the documents, Apple acknowledged that the apple and pineapple are different, but said they are “both names for fruits and thus give a similar commercial impression.” According to the documents, the company was also considering objections to Ms Carlisi’s pineapple grenade logo.
“It’s not even an apple,” said Ms Carlisi, 46, who has just started releasing music and has seven monthly listeners on Spotify. “You tell people they can’t appropriate fruit or anything that has anything to do with Apple, which is this giant company.”
Founded in 1974, the company originally known as Apple Computer wasn’t always so litigious. Until 2000, the company filed only a few trademark objections annually, peaking at nine in 1989, according to the Tech Transparency Project. At least one of these objections involved an electronics retailer that sold computer parts under the name Pineapple.
In those years, Apple Computer was better known as a trademark defendant. In 1978, Apple Corps, the holding company founded by the Beatles, sued Apple Computer for trademark infringement, the first salvo in a series of legal disputes between the two companies over the following decades. In 2007, the two Apple companies finally agreed to transfer all Apple-related trademarks to the Silicon Valley company.
By then, Apple, which dropped the word “computer” from its name, was filing dozens of trademark objections every year.
As Apple grew, its legal team most likely wanted to prevent brand dilution, said Barton Beebe, a professor at New York University School of Law. According to him, in intellectual property theory, the legal argument is not that one could be confused by two different trademarks, but that granting a new trademark would reduce the value of a household’s logo or name.
“Thinning is death by a thousand cuts, and you must prevent the first cut,” Mr Beebe said. “That’s an argument for the judges.”
According to Ashley Dobbs, professor of law at the University of Richmond, Apple has since created a template for contesting trademark applications. This is evident from a comparison of her responses to the two applicants, where she used standard oppositional language.
One of the responses was to the Appleton Area School District, a 16,000-student public education system in Appleton, Wisconsin, whose logo features three intertwined apples. Another was directed at Big Apple Curry, a New York-based Indian cooking blog, because of its title. In Apple’s filings against them, entire sections were copied verbatim to establish the value of the company’s brand — “a Forbes valuation of $206 billion” in 2019 — and its “extraordinary level of notoriety and consumer acceptance.”
Representatives for the school district and Big Apple Curry, who deleted their applications, declined to comment.
“There is a cost-effectiveness in going after multiple people with the same argument,” Ms. Dobbs said. She added that Apple was ahead of other companies such as Disney and Warner Bros., which were litigating over intellectual property.
Occasionally, Apple will go to the Trademark Complaints Review Board to renew a new trademark and then contact the entrepreneur or company to change their application. Lacey Brown, 38, an Atlanta-based artist who created a caricature of a fictional medicine man named Dr. Apples, said it was “devastating” when Apple filed paperwork to ask for more time to potentially challenge its 2020 trademark application. year. a trademark request after discussions with Apple’s lawyers, who never filed a formal objection.
But Apple ran into trouble last year when Ms. Brown tried to trademark her Talk About Apples podcast, which was based on her character Dr. Apple. In its objection, the company argued that people might confuse its podcast with its podcast service.
“This is an African-American medicine man talking about fictional fantasies, monsters and ghouls,” Ms. Brown said. “No one has ever linked me to Apple.” However, she withdrew her podcast’s trademark application.
In 2019, Dr. Surya Reddy filed for a trademark for the logo and name of Apple Urgent Care, which operates clinics in Riverside County, California. Apple countered by noting that its logo, like its own, includes an apple with a piece missing and a “leaf cut off at an angle.”
Dr. Reddy said he thinks Apple’s case is ridiculous because it’s not a healthcare provider. But he didn’t have the money to test this theory, and he withdrew his application.
“I’m a small company,” he said. “Once they object, you feel so small.”
However, Ms. Carlisi responded to Apple in court and won a concession. The company agreed to drop the objection if it included a disclaimer in its trademark application, noting that Frankie Pineapple — a nod to her late father Frankie and a fruit sometimes considered a rebellious feminist symbol — was not her real name. .
Although the legal escalation cost her about $10,000, Ms Carlisi got some inspiration from it. She said her debut single, which is about sticking it on a man and using a famous expletive, was inspired by her battle with Apple.