20 June 2013

Swapnil Bhartiya's picture
Posted by Swapnil Bhartiya on October 21, 2011

Apple's legal arm, which I think is bigger than its developer base, seems to have a monthly target to meet. The company is now going after a small, family run café in Bonn Germany over logo design.

Fabian A. Scherschel writes in Lxnews, "The owner of the café Apfelkind, Christin Römer, has registered her logo as a trademark for the service and fashion industry in June in Munich."

Apple's lawyers sent the owner a cease and desist letter 'claiming' that their logo design would lead to confusion between the small café in Bonn and their global entertainment brand.

I wonder if there is remotest of the remote resemblance in the two logos. How is this Cafe going to confuse users? I mean will you go to the counter and order two iPads in this cafe thss taking business away from Apple, or because of this cafe users will start ordering Coffee in Apple Stores?

Here are the two logos

Apfel Kind logoApple Logo

According to Lxnews, "The owners of Apfelkind (which is German for “apple child”) are currently deciding if they will change their logo but they have filed a legal letter with Apple disputing the technology giant’s claim of confusion and the fact that Apfelkind is infringing on Apple Inc.’s trademark."

It looks like everything that is round with a leaf is an infringement of Apple's logo design.

This is not the first time Apple has gone after companies from a completely different segment. In September Apple launched a campaign against Chinese Sichuan Fangguo Food Co. over their logo design.

Swapnil Bhartiya

A free software fund-a-mental-ist and Charles Bukowski fan, Swapnil also writes fiction and tries to find cracks in a proprietary company's 'paper armours'. He is a big movie buff and prefers listening to music at such high volumes that he's gone partially deaf when it comes to identifying anything positive about proprietary companies. You can follow him on Twitter, Google+ & Facebook. You can write to him on editor at muktware dot com