Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland

Welcome to Earth: Where the NEWS is our barometer for determining how far we are from 1984.

It's articles like these that invoke a sense of surreal prescience. I remember experiencing this same eerie feeling back when I was still trying to convince my employer that WFH would be unavoidable. The CXO (I put X because I can't remember what made up executive role they had at the time) still shrugged it off as "Just a flu".

I remember sitting at a coffee shop at the beach one night with a close friend talking about the general state of things and how it felt crazy to know that soon things will be different forever in ways we can't begin to imagine. Back then I made a thread about it, though, given the channish nature of it, nobody here cared much for it either (you know, it was back in the early days, when "Hug an Asian" campaign was still taking place in the US, you know, the same time as the "fiery but mostly peaceful protests".

This title has a similar feeling to it. The only difference is the enemy now is not some invisible force of nature, but humanmade horrors we impose upon ourselves.

Anarchy as a concept always sounded insane, but look at what the people who have the most money in the world do with it. They don't give a fuck about the issues that are actually important. They will release a PR and keep up appearances while renting out server farms of bots to subdue critical opinion, and subvert any efforts to point these things out by creating fanatics (which is ironic, because fanaticism in today's world is a fully captured market - complete with branded interactions).

Now we are the ones in need of fanatics. People like RMS, who called these things from the start. Yet we turn our backs on them and call them insane. We let companies smear and tarnish their image.

We are at the point where we need a revolution, but we won't get one, because the last humans that haven't been enslaved by comfort are falling every day, and people are remarkably adept at being satisfied living in squalor if the previous iteration was just slightly worse.

Its difficult to imagine how the world will look in this future where only a single school of thought is permitted.

As a gay man from Africa, I apologise if my lived experiences come across as provocative. "Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to our democracy."

> What trauma does it take to warp a human mind into thinking you can own the concept of images of a fruit?

That trauma goes by its other name: "money." Or sometimes by its synonyms, "Dollar, Pound, Euro, Swiss franc" among others.

>no good vision

Interesting choice of words given their new product announcement a few weeks back at WWDC.

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.