Apple sees red (delicious) over grocery logo

By | October 5, 2009, 9:22am PDT

Summary: Apple fears Australian grocery chain’s new logo looks too much like an apple.

At first blush, it’s hard to glean the controversy between Apple Inc’s famous Apple logo and the Australian grocery chain Woolworth’s new W logo, although, in gleaming green, it certainly look like apple peelings.

But Apple is seeing red delicious over the chain’s choice of logo for two pretty good reasons, as The Age points out.

First, Woolworth’s plans to package that appley W on “every imaginable product.” And second, among those products are several lines of consumer electronics. Consider that Apple is a computer and cellphone company that has become a premium retailer and that Woolworth’s is a retailer that already sells phones and could easily sell computers, and Apple seems to have a strong objection.

Notwithstanding the fact that Apple once disclaimed any confusion with the Beatles’ Apple label because it was a computer company, not a music company.

Woolworth’s designer Hans Hulsbosch, thinks Apple wants to stop logo with an apple or any other fruit in it. “Based on this logic, they would have to take action against every fruit-seller.”

Trademark law is a use-it-or-lose-it doctrine, however, and Apple has the lawyers to protest everything, so better safe than sorry.

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Richard Koman

http://government.zdnet.com/?page_id=3731

Biography

Richard Koman

Richard Koman is an attorney admitted to practice in California. As a technology writer since the mid-1980s, Richard Koman has documented the role of computing in the transformation of the graphic arts, the growth of the Web and the birth of the peer-to-peer phenomenon. He worked as a book and web editor for O'Reilly Media throughout the 1990s, editing several influential websites and numerous best-sellers. As a lawyer, as well as a tech writer, he brings a unique perspective to the blog's intersection of law, government and technology.
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RE: Apple sees red (delicious) over grocery logo
jfreedle2@... 10th Oct 2009
Yet another reason to shut Apple down.
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total bs . . .
CobraA1 5th Oct 2009
There is absolutely no way that green thing
resembles even remotely the Apple logo.
...every time I EAT an apple?

The thinner Stevie Boy's body gets...the more swelled his head is getting.

This is a truly pathetic attempt. sad
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Nope
WarhavenSC 5th Oct 2009
You'll only have to pay Wonder Boy royalties if you use his trademark abilities of flight and to kill a yak from 200 yards away with mind bullets. Otherwise, you're in the clear.
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grin
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The more I see of Apple's behavior, the less I want to give them my
business. Having been an Apple user since the early eighties Aplle is not
the only one to be seeing red.
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What I carry away from this article is that Apple believes their customer base to be so clueless as to not have the ability to tell the difference between a computer, and a grocery store.
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Wait, wait, wait....
Hallowed are the Ori 5th Oct 2009
Perhaps Apple is planning to move into the high end food business!!!

Bananas? $7.50 per pound.

Milk? $14 dollars per gallon.

Ground beef? $26 dollars per pound.

Black Angus ribeye steaks? $75 dollars per pound.

It'll be the same food you could get at Publix or Bi-Lo, but it'll be better, because it cost more and it's from Apple!!!
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Can't agree more (Apple's next move?)
bolscher@... 5th Oct 2009
Apple's next move into the food business made me lol.

Spelling error on first paragraph "it certainly look(*S*) like apple peelings."
Almost as bad as the guys that were trying to sue for owning the rights to every possible combination of phone tones. Anyone that buys a product based solely on what logo is on it should not be buying anything to begin with.
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Another case of the lawyers getting rich by the fear mongering they push so hard. May they all suffer the fate that will assign them to Hades.
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Old ATL Big Apple grocery chain
jabster17 6th Oct 2009
There was an old ATL grocery chain from the 1950s-1970s called Big Apple...see

http://www.groceteria.com/2007/02/06/atlanta-1978/

and

http://www.groceteria.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=414
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Yet another reason to shut Apple down.

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