Apple is pushing a 111-year-old Swiss association to change its logo: Report

Apple is trying to get a trademark on all depictions of the actual apple fruit. Fruit Union Suisse says that Apple is planning to gain intellectual property rights to images of apples in Switzerland, reported Wired UK.  Fruit Union Suisse is a Swiss association that promotes the interests of Swiss fruit growers from the past 111 years. Apple is making the association rethink its logo.

The logo of Fruit Union Suisse is a full red apple with a white cross on it. Just the image is very different when compared to bitten Apple design of the iPhone maker. Hence, it is highly unlikely that it can be mistaken as Apple logo.  

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"We have a hard time understanding this [case with Apple], 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”, said Director Jimmy Mariethoz,

 

"We're concerned that any visual representation of an apple — so anything that's audiovisual or linked to new technologies or to media — could be potentially impacted. Theoretically, we could be entering slippery territory every time we advertise with an apple," he added.

Initially, Apple had filed an application for a black-and-white depiction of a Granny Smith apple in Switzerland, back in 2017. Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) eventually granted Apple partial rights.

In 2022, IPI gave Apple a partial win clarifying that Apple could have the right to only certain of the submitted categories. The company is now trying to win the rest of the rights.

This is not the first time Apple has pushed a company to change its logo. Back in 2020, Apple filed a case against a meal-preparing startup called Prepear arguing that their pear-shaped logo looked similar to its half-bitten Apple logo. As a result, the startup was compelled to tweak its logo. World Intellectual Property Organisation has several similar reports of Apple going after startups for their logo.

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