Sorry, Boys and Girls, This Fruit is Taken

Posted by Mashable in Tuesday, October 7th 2008

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Gizmodo reports that Apple, a company known for being trigger happy when it comes to lawsuits of all kinds, has sued a school for using an apple in their logo.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone will ever confuse Victoria School of Business and Technology in Canada with the company that makes iThings. One could say that this is just how intellectual property laws are set up at the moment (in short: if you don’t sue, your trademark is devalued), but I’m not really sure about it. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the criteria for the possibility of confusion between two trademarks, in order of importance (this is just one example, US courts can set up their own criteria):

# Strength of the mark
# Proximity of the goods
# Similarity of the marks
# Evidence of actual confusion
# Marketing channels used
# Type of goods and the degree of care likely to be exercised by the purchaser
# Defendant’s intent in selecting the mark
# Likelihood of expansion of the product lines

Now, I’m not an expert, but besides possibly “similarity of the mark” and “strength of the mark,” I don’t really see much evidence that anyone will ever confuse Victoria School’s apple with Apple’s apple. And I doubt that the school will start producing consumer electronics any time soon. Plus, as Gizmodo notes, you can never look good if you sue a school. Oh well, maybe Apple’s lawyers have to fill some kind of monthly quota and this came in handy.

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