And the worst part is that Apple is wasting tax-payer money around the world with this kind of mitigations. While it avoids paying taxes, illegally for sure but difficult to prove, it wastes money that could have spend in public education or health care. Apple is so big that it becomes pure cartoonish evilness without even trying. It is time to break up all these monstrosities.
Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
71–80 of 191 posts
Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#72Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point, every company's "how to spend the money" has to turn into "give it back to the shareholders and let them seed more ideas". Infinite growth is pretty impossible.
We can thank Jack Welch for making it popular to consider shareholders as the most important cohort of people to be rewarded when a business goes well... His way of managing businesses completely infests MBA programs around the world.
Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which isn’t what’s happening. A fruit seller has a hypothetical concern over a trademark application, which is how you turn a non story into a story on a slow news day.
Apple is manoeuvring itself into a position where it could Without any other reasonable explanation for why it should Except for the one of which Fruit Union is afraid it would
You want a reasonable explanation such as they might want to use a 3D logo when launching a 3D product their currently spending millions advertising.
Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are rank-and-file (not engineering) employees of Apple compensated in enough stock that buybacks are really worth that much? I highly doubt it. And even then, until those shares are sold they are subject to the whims of the market. Paper millionaire status doesn't mean shit if you can barely afford to pay rent. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush...
SWEs at Apple are not "barely able to afford rent"
Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are rank-and-file (not engineering) employees of Apple compensated in enough stock that buybacks are really worth that much? I highly doubt it. And even then, until those shares are sold they are subject to the whims of the market. Paper millionaire status doesn't mean shit if you can barely afford to pay rent. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush...
SWEs at Apple are not "barely able to afford rent"
Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
As always, the sound bites obscure the issue. The concern is not the specific request, but how widely trademark is enforceable, which is a question of IP law not Apple’s actions. Apple applied for a design patent for a very specific design and ignorant people flipped out completely misunderstanding the issue. Yet again there’s another story where the details matter and you get articles like this completely glossing o…
> Apple applied for a design patent for a very specific design https://www3.wipo.int/madrid/monitor/jsp/data.jsp?KEY=ROM_AC... doesn't look like a very specific design to me, but like a pretty generic apple. > as it applies to electronic devices and a few other narrow categories This is neither a few nor narrow, imho: Musical sound recordings; sound recordings featuring entertainment, music, musicians, documentaries,…
Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#78> THE FRUIT UNION Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of appl…
Their logo: https://www.swissfruit.ch/wp-content/themes/dudapress/dist/a...
Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#79EU's relatively large fines to the US tech sector has been a breath of fresh air, lets do more of that on a global basis.
Re: Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
#80This is kind of the opposite of a similar situation that just happened in Chile The company NotCo got sued by the milk producers association for mis-using the word Leche (milk in Spanish) in their NotMilk product so it doesn’t use the word Milk The milk producers won and the courts have ordered NotCo to change the name of their NotMilk product
I feel like that is (should be?) more about food safety rather than IP. If you call it X but it has no nutritional similarity to X, that could be dangerous to consumers. That's not to say other attempts at protecting food-related terms aren't profit protection instead. Take "champagne" for example...
And yet nobody seems to have been harmed by the existence of these terms:
(1) Sweetbread
(2) Coconut Meat
(3) Coconut Milk
(4) Nutmeat
(5) Headcheese
(6) Welsh Rabbit
(7) Rocky Mountain Oysters
(8) Boston Cream Pie
(9) Scotch Woodcock
(10) Cold Duck
None of which refer to the nominal food definition of the term in their name.