After targeting New York City’s GreenNYC campaign earlier this year, Apple is now threatening The Victoria School of Business and Technology for infringing on the Apple logo.
The school, located in British Columbia, Canada, contends the claim of infringement:
We strongly disagree and say so in our reply letter. Whether you agree with Apple, or say no you don’t agree we invite you to vote, and/or post your comments. We don’t have their deep pockets for a legal fight so we thought we would let the public bear witness and see if Apple might learn to play nice … not that we are naive, but hey, they may surprise us :-)
Posted along with the comment is an informal poll asking visitors whether they believe the school’s logo can, in fact, be confused with Apple’s corporate trademark. At the time of this writing, the vast majority of respondents (72% of nearly 5,000 responses) agree with the school’s opinion that the logos cannot be easily confused.
In this case, the claims are not totally out of left field (like they seemed to be with GreenNYC) since the VSBT is a tech school. Are they taking advantage of the Apple association to attract more students and therefore more tuition dollars? Or has Apple tightened, rather than loosened, their legal reigns?
In a related story, Apple is suing Alexander Graham Bell over his use of the word “Phone.”
There was no comment from Apple’s attorneys when asked about a pending lawsuit against God over the use of “I.”
People keep kicking off at Apple for doing this, but you have to defend your trademark or you can lose it. With something as simple as Apples logo its even more important because its so easily imitated.
IANAL, but as I understand it if you are in a trademark case and it can be found that you have not vigorously defended your trademark in the past then you can lose your trademark. So legit or not Apple has to make a show of defending it in order to keep it.