Apple is apparently trying to secure the trademark rights of illustrations that resemble apples – as in the fruit. The company was seemingly successful in its bizarre endeavor in a number of countries and has now set its sight on securing similar rights in Switzerland, according to a report from WIRED.
The issue is a particularly sticky one in Switzerland, one that would affect the country’s Fruit Union Suisse – its largest fruit farmer’s group which has existed for over a century. The group’s logo is one of a red, biteless apple with the Swiss cross placed on the apple’s top right corner. The group fears that it would be forced to change its logo if the Cupertino tech giant is successful with its legal attempt.
We have a hard time understanding this, because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple. Their objective here is really to own the rights to an actual apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal … that should be free for everyone to use.
Jimmy Mariéthoz, Fruit Union Suisse director
The report points out that Apple has successfully acquired the rights to generic apples in other countries, including Japan, Turkey, and Armenia. Interestingly, this is also not Apple’s first attempt at securing a trademark of generic apples in Switzerland, as the company first applied with the country’s Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) back in 2017.
The application requested rights to “a realistic, black-and-white depiction” of Granny Smith apples, covering broad categories. IPI denied Apple’s request as the trademark rights were deemed to belong to the public domain. In turn, Apple appealed IPI’s decision, with the appeal filed in the spring still awaiting trial. Per WIRED, the Swiss court’s decision is not expected to come out for “months, possibly years.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Apple has contested IP rights in Switzerland, with mixed results. In 2010, the company forced a small Swiss grocery chain to agree never to add a bite mark to its logo that features an ordinary apple placed inside a shopping cart. On the other hand, Apple was forced to pay out $21 million to Swiss Federal Railways after the Cupertino company was found to have illegally copied the railway clock’s design on the iPad’s Clock app. The Apple Watch launch in Switzerland also had to be delayed, as an existing “apple” trademark filed in the 1980s was owned by another watchmaker.
The report notes that Apple is infamously notorious for a practice known as trademark opposition, in which a company contests the trademark rights of another company as its own. Research conducted by Tech Transparency Project revealed that Apple filed more trademark opposition requests between 2019 and 2021 than Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Google combined.
