The Beatles, Apple, and iTunes

novus ordo writes "Apple is being sued in London by Apple Corps, owned by the former Beatles and their heirs. This is a third battle over the name 'Apple' in Britain. Apple Corps has previously been awarded $26M by Apple Computer for the use of the name."

Comments

Gah?

[tomstdenis]

I dunno, but only people who are over the age of 50 would even be old enough to remember the Beatles and specifically the name "Apple" being associated with them.

If you ask any random 16-24 yr old person on the street the name of the Beatles label you'll probably get a low percentage of correct answers.

I don't see how Apple Computers is in anyway confusing people away from the Apple label. When I think itunes I don't think of the Beatles. I think of frustration at using a crappy piece of software [in light of things like GNUpod] and horrible DRM.

Tom

Re:Gah?

[hey!]

Precisely proof that Apple Computer has diluted the trademark of Apple Corps to the extent that they have illegally substituted their brand for that of the original owners.

Agreed.

Which is why this lawsuit against Apple Computer must succeed to be fair.

Disagree.

The original lawuit was lawyer driven legal harassment. You can't own a common word in countries I know of, except to differentiate your product within its specific class of products. Since there was no chance that tunes from the Beatles catalog could be confused with microcomputers, the original suit had no merit. Apple Computer paid Apple Music a token amount that probably covered part their expenses bringing the suit, which meant the Apple Music's lawyers got their payday. However the lawyer's clients could hardly have been happy walking away from what their lawyers told them was a threat to their trademark, so the laywer extracted from Apple Computer what was then an empty promise: that Apple Computer would stay out of the music business.

And the substance and letter of that then empty promise is what is at issue.

Now, if you'll note, Apple Computer is very careful to avoid branding their muisc services as "Apple" music service. It's "iTunes(tm)". The closest you get to associating the words "iTunes" and "Apple" is that there is an "iTunes" page on the apple web site. However, in the store itself, you are running inside the iTunes program, and the web content provided doesn't say "Apple" anywhere in it. This should be surprising; companies running stores usually are drilling their names into your brain at every opportunity. You've got the "Apple Computer" logo on the iTunes program frame, but it never appears inside the content pane. Get it? You are using Apple Computer software to access the music store, but the music end of the business is not branded with Apple Music's name.

In my view, this is pure sophistry, since you can't readily use the Apple iTunes software with anything but the Apple iTunes store. And Apple knows better than anyone else that the delivery mechanism is part of a unified customer experience -- that's their very strategy. Users don't differentiate between an Apple logo in the window frame and an Apple logo in the content pane.

So now I think Apple Corps Music has a legitimate trademark beef with Apple Computer; however that's not what's at issue. What's at issue is Apple's promise about staying out of the music business. The question is, did Apple Computer's lawyers cleverly trick Apple Corps lawyers into thinkng they'd agreed to stay out of the music business, when if fact all they did was agree to stay out of the music business as it existed then, to wit: distributing recordings of music on physical media. If so, it was a sneaky (professwional from the lawyer's point of view) thing to do; computer people even then must have been aware that music could be encoded and transmitted digitally without any physical distribution media.

The thing is, now that they've leveraged their computer business to get into the music business, it wouldn't be hard for Apple Computer to fix the trademark problem. They might have to pay a one time settlement and desist from associating their Apple Computer logo with their music store, which is easy as designing a new iTunes logo and updating their software. But if Apple Corps could sink its teeth into the very business of iTunes, rather than its trade dress, they'd be onto something magnitudes larger. Like the original lawsuit, it's a self-serving abuse of the legal systems put in place to help artists, and by which the Beatles had already profited beyond all but the wildest dreams of greed.

And it all hinges on exactly how the concept of "staying out of the music business" was worded in the original settlement. I'll bet that Mr. Jobs and his lawyers fleeced those Apple Corps bastards and left them buck-naked in the oncoming snow storm. God help the bastard who meets a smarter bastard.