Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

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Does Apple have some nefarious reason to do this? Because on the surface it makes little sense why Apple would take this action.

While I can see a couple of similarities between Apple's and Prepear's logos - they're both 2D images of fruits - they're almost completely different in every other way: one is a pear, one is an apple; one is green, the other is black; one is outlined, one is a block colour; one has a chunk taken out of it, the other doesn't; one is rotated slightly, the other is upright.

Given that I'm not sure how anyone could mistake Prepear's logo for Apple's, why would Apple be concerned about this, or even dedicate the time and money to go after Prepear? Not to mention the risk Apple is taking of attracting bad press for aggressively going after a small company in this way.

Is this just a case of a legal team trying to justify their value by bumping up the number of trademark violations they've managed to prevent this month? Otherwise what would the motivation be to do this given there is obviously no trademark risk here?

IANAL, but in general there are two reasons for things like this.

1 - Preventing trademark erosion. Companies have a duty to be proactive and continually challenge trademark infringements. If not, the trademark can become invalid. e.g. this happened with Sony's Walkman (TM).

However, they don't seem to have good grounds for it in this case. They are dissimilar enough (both in visual style and domain) that no reasonable consumer would get confused.

2 - Over-eagerness from the legal department. [Speculation, may not apply to Apple.] Pressure to get billables, to prove individual relevance, or even just busywork can -- in the absence of clear guidelines and policy -- lead to the legal dept taking unnecessary action. This becomes more true the more silo'd the different departments in a company are.

I believe this is a natural thing for big companies to evolve into, which can be addressed amongst other things through SOP's, guidelines, oversight (i.e. more people signing off).

Suffice to say that your average conglomerate cease and desist has not passed the desk of the CEO.

> Preventing trademark erosion. > However, they don't seem to have good grounds for it in this case.

Does that mean this is just suing companies for the sake of suing?

That might be jumping the gun a bit. Malice for the sake of malice is usually one of the least credible options.

Other valid possibilities:

- They don't agree with me on the first point.

- Someone followed an un-nuanced SOP.

- They expect a strategic benefit from this kind of attitude.

- People are making choices from a job-security perspective rather than a greater good (or even greater good of the company) perspective.

- ...

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