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The Apple Name Game
Apple Core sent a link to an article running in Australia about Apple fighting for their name with some little telco called Apple Communications. Well, they were called that. Now they are Green.
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I know at least one person is going to bash me for this, but if you were founding a company, wouldn't you try to come up with an original name? I mean, there are a telecommunications company, so it is possible that they could be mistaken for Apple.
Apple is only obligated to go after trademark infringements by companies that are in similar industries. So, of course, they're not going to go after your local grocery store, carpet cleaning services, towing companies, maid services, or whatever else stuck "Apple" in their name so they'd be in the front of the phone book.
But a telecommunications company is fair game since Apple does telecommunications. With the convergence of computers and traditional telephony (e.g. VoIP, modems, 2.4 GHz wireless, DSL), the two industries are becoming basically the same thing these days.
Remember that Apple has one of the top 10 most recognized trademarks, and there are a lot of companies that wish to make some money (through name recognition) off that trademark. At the same time, they hope to mount a sympathy defense by citing how small they are.
I think he certainly knew what what he was doing when he named his company. I wouldn't be surprised if he hoped that Apple would buy him out to settle the naming rights in Australia (much the same way Microsoft did with "Internet Explorer), but they already had the global naming rights. After that didn't happen, he probably figured a $100,000 settlement is pretty cheap to get nationwide publicity for his company. He gets a newspaper article about him, and the sympathy of misguided trademark-haters around the world.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The growth of the Internet also makes it possible to hear about stories that otherwise might not have been reported stateside. I mean, this was a rather minor case that happened half the world away from the USA, yet it's being reported on a USA-centric site. Just like other news events, we seem to think that the frequency an event happening is the same as the frequency of the media reporting the event. Last year's "increase" in child abductions was such a case, actual cases did not increase, but the rollout of the Amber Alert system in many states gave police a process that notifed all of the local news outlets. Suddenly, child abductions went from a story in segment B of the newscast to a breaking story that disrupted programming. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all have deals with groups of local stations take from their coverage, so a local special report can quickly go national on a slow news day. The public sees several reports on child abductions in a short time frame and thinks there's a crisis going on, when really the risk of the tradegy hasn't changed or is being driven down because a once ignored problem is getting so much attention.
Woz was SORT of okay? I mean the guy is brilliant, yet very humble. If it weren't for him, there would be no Apple today, yet he still gets paid around $50k a year. If you read about things that Woz has done, like giving his stocks away to other apple empoyees who missed out on the IPO, and teaching computer classes for poor kids you start to realize that Woz is probably a much better guy than most of us (no "sort of" about it).
Interesting to note that Apple leaves alone people like Apple Auto Glass here in Canada -- different industry!
We should be more concerned with the ownership of generic words at the DNS level which is the real trademark travesty these days.
The thing about trademarks are you MUST defend them or you will lose them. One instance where you could have reasonably known of the existance of trademark ingringement where you don't defend will strip you of your trademark. Its that simple.