Apple v. Big Apple

There's been a bit of a brouhaha recently over Apple Inc. trying to block the City of New York from receiving a trademark for a similar logo they’ve designed for their “Green NYC” campaign. The consensus reaction seems to be that this is a fairly frivolous lawsuit on Apple's part, but I doubt that Apple really cares about this very much...they might even secretly approve of it for all we know.

What a lot of people fail to realize is that one aspect of being granted a trademark by the United States Patent Office is an *obligation* to vigorously defend said mark against any and all reasonable violations. Whether Apple wins or loses this case, they will have defended their trademark, which will reinforce their position against any future, more egregious violations.

So, there’s a good chance that the City of New York will win this case, and both sides will walk away happy.

However, Apple might just have the wisp of a case here after all. As with most people, I would have thought that the similarities between the two logos was mostly coincidental, but that was until I came across the image below at the Blue Ember blog, showing artwork from the “Green NYC” campaign alongside Apple’s three-year old packaging for “iLife ’05”.

It was easy enough to give the City of New York the benefit of the doubt when just looking at the two “apple” logos, but it’s nearly impossible to suppose that Apple Inc was not the primary inspiration for the “Green NYC” campaign when looking at the image above. I mean, wow.

Now, this is most likely still not grounds for a pure trademark violation, but it’s pretty clear now that the City of New York is not a completely innocent party here.

If, at this point, you’re asking yourself “Who cares?”, well the answer is “Nobody”. Moving on now...

Comments

[jess]

are you the david dugan that used to date jennifer connelly?