You will have no other apple but me: Apple takes Swiss fruit producers to court
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For some reason, the apple carries with it a history of quarrels and disputes as long as man’s. The list grows every day, but in recent years the name of Apple is used more and more frequently. The latest episode, as Wired explains, concerns Fruit Union Suisse, the largest organization of fruit growers in Switzerland: it has existed for 111 years and has a red apple with a white cross as its logo. The logo was revised in 2011, for the centenary of the association (but even before it depicted an apple with the Swiss cross). The first request from Cupertino came in 2017, when Apple approached the Swiss Intellectual Property Institute (IPI) to claim the rights to the black and white figure of an apple, including potential uses such as music, video, DVD and film .
The case
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For the past decade, Apple has been fighting in Switzerland to protect its brand. At the time, the Federal Court held, among other things, that the general public commonly associated the term “Apple” with the IT company, which helped tip the scales in its favor. Now it has decided not only to protect the name, but also its logo, so that no one else can use it. According to Wired, the IPI partially granted the request last fall, saying Apple may have some of the reclaimed rights, but cited a legal principle “that considers generic images of commons — like apples — to be in the public domain.”
This is the case B-4493/2022, Registration of the figurative mark “apple”. The complainant, i.e. Apple, claims to be “the holder of the US-based international registration IR 1.028.240 (the image of an apple), which is claimed for goods in class 9. These goods consist mainly of sound recordings , video and cinematographic and from the corresponding data carriers Apple “requested the extension of the protection of the contested sign in Switzerland”, which the IPI refused on September 2, 2022, so Tim Cook’s company appealed to the Administrative Court Swiss Federal.
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But be careful: the image of the apple under discussion is not the Apple logo, that of the iPhone, but of another Apple, that of the Beatles. In short, Apple Corp and not Apple Inc. To make the matter even more complicated is the fact that the Apple Corp logo has been owned by Apple Inc. since February 2007: after a long legal battle that Steve Jobs lost several times, in the end, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement whereby the image rights of the Beatles’ label passed to the Cupertino company. And for this reason the reference in the request to “sound, video and cinematographic recordings and the corresponding data carriers” makes sense.
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However, it is difficult to imagine how this commercial area could conflict with the activity of Fruit Union Suisse. If you go to 1976, when Apple was born, perhaps there is a common point. In Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs explains that he was following one of his fruitarian diets and that he had just returned from a farm where apples were grown, and he thought that the name Apple Computer sounded “funny, witty and not intimidating”; the story is confirmed by Steve Wozniak, the other co-founder of Apple.
Yet Jimmy Mariéthoz, director of Fruit Union Suisse, doesn’t seem very interested in the origins of the most famous tech brand in the world. “If the patent is accepted, the use of an image with apples could become problematic, especially in relation to our advertising activities for Swiss fruit,” he comments to Wired. “We are optimistic about the judgment of the competent authorities because the image of an apple belongs to everyone and was not invented by Apple”. A definitive judgment should arrive within the year, but Mariéthoz could be denied if not on a general level, at least in one particular case: when you consult the Fruit Union Suisse website, in fact, the apple logo in the browser tab is very small , and the resemblance to Apple’s is quite evident, although certainly not intentional.
This isn’t the only case Apple is fighting. Apple has more copyright filings pending than Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Google combined; between 2019 and 2021 alone, there were 215 legal disputes, according to the Tech Transparency Project. The brands targeted by the Cupertino giant very often do not seem to pose a threat to his business, such as a stationery brand called Paperapple, an organization that supports families of children with autism and a school district in Appleton Wisconsin. As the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper recalls, in 2010 Apple wanted to ban a small Swiss cooperative of food retailers from using its logo with an apple. An out-of-court settlement was also reached in that case. Two years ago, PrePear, a convenience food platform, decided to change its logo after Apple took it to court claiming it looked too similar to its own. The one in the app was a pear: according to Cupertino, the similarity was not in the fruit, but in the leaf.
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