The Beatles’ company Apple Corps lost its long-running trademark battle with Apple Computer in a British High Court ruling on Monday over the use of the famous name and logo.
Apple Corps had accused the United States company of breaching a trademark agreement by promoting music products.
The dispute centred on Apple Computer’s revolutionary iTunes music-store website, which allows users of its iPod to download and save thousands of songs.
The Beatles’ company was seeking financial damages and court orders to stop Apple Computer using the “apple” marks in connection with the iTunes website.
The rock’n’roll legends’ multimedia corporation sued the US firm in a multimillion-pound action over the use of the Apple name and logo in a spat that goes back to the 1980s.
London-based Apple Corps claimed the computer company was in breach of a 1991 agreement that forbade each side entering the other’s exclusive “field of use” of the Apple name.
The deal between the companies gave Apple Corps — owned by former Beatles Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the widows of bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison — the exclusive right to use “apple” marks for the record business, the firm’s lawyer Geoffrey Vos told the court in March.
The US company had exclusive rights to do so for the computer, telecommunications and data processing industry.
The peace had held between the two firms until the iPod was launched in 2001. The 1991 agreement was arguably drawn up to cover CDs and tapes, well ahead of technological developments such as iTunes.
Vos told the court that calling the iPod download system a mere electronic device was a “perversion” of the constraints in the 1991 deal.
He claimed Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs had said that downloading music from the internet was the same as buying a record nowadays.
Vos argued that the US firm had violated the deal by selling music online.
He showed the judge how to download from the iTunes website.
He chose the 1978 hit Le Freak by Chic, which filled the courtroom with disco beats as he showed how many times the “apple” logo appeared on the screen as he carried out the download.
Apple Corps is represented by a green Granny Smith apple, while the computer firm’s original logo was a multicoloured, striped apple with a chunk missing. Its new logo is grey.
Apple Computer is the market leader for music downloads, with about three million songs being downloaded each day from its iTunes service.
It was founded in 1976 by Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and the first generation of Macintosh computers was born in 1984. — AFP