The View from a Drawbridge

It seems that Apple, Inc. has been going after the trademark for the image of a Granny Smith apple, both sideview and sliced, all over the world. According to this article and this one, we’re not talking about just their iconic image of an apple with a bite out of it. (I refuse to promote them by displaying it, but you know the one I’m talking about.) No. we’re talking the basic image of an actual apple. They’ve succeeded in getting such trademarks in Israel, Japan, the European Union and the African Union.

Only Switzerland is fighting back, and they have quite a bit of skin (or apple peel, as the case may be) in the game. Swiss apple farmers are naturally up in arms about this, as they often use an apple logo in their marketing. And if Apple, Inc. gets this trademark, will they then be banned from using photographs of Granny Smiths in their packaging to sell the actual product? That seems absurd, but no one quite knows what Apple, Inc. is trying to achieve with these trademarks.

Basic trademark rules would protect them in that no competitors would be able to use the apple logo. That’s fair. Another computer company shouldn’t be able to profit from pretending to be Apple, Inc. But apple growers are hardly industry competitors. So they should be safe, right?

Well, In the past, Apple, Inc. has gone after an organization that supports families of children with autism, a school district in Appleton, Wisconsin, and an online test prep service for nursing students. That seems a bit anal to me, and one would think it would be hard to enforce, but when you have the kind of money that Apple, Inc. does, it would be hard for a little school district to defend itself against that. So in essence, Apple might even win if it doesn’t really have a leg to stand on and never sees their complaint go to trial. So those Swiss apple growers have good cause for concern. (In the interests of full disclosure, I have no idea if the school district case ever went to court or how it turned out. I just went over to their home page, and they still have apples in their logo, but no one would mistake them for a computer company while looking at it.)

Proof positive of Apple, Inc.’s misuse of power, in my opinion, is that they were also in a legal dispute for years with the Beatles record label, Apple Corps. When I think of the images on most of my childhood LP’s and 45’s, I get this warm, fuzzy feeling. The corps has been around since 1968, whereas Apple, Inc. was only just starting up in 1976. You’d think that alone would be enough to thwart this corporation’s overreach, but no. They finally won their suit, and now Apple, Inc. owns the trademark, but has agreed to license certain of those trademarks back to Apple Corps for their continued use. How generous of them.

Since Apple, Inc. is also in the music business, I can see why they might cast their eyes upon Apple Corps as a competitor that apparently wasn’t savvy enough to ever trademark its imagery, but this feels kind of sacrilegious to me. It’s akin to one branch of Christianity trademarking the cross and making other branches beg them for a license to use it, or else all their stained-glass windows (among so many other things) would have to be shattered. It just feels wrong.

Here is an image of granny Smith apples. I post them here as an act of defiance. Hopefully the Man will have bigger fish to fry than to make me take these images off my humble little non-monetized blog. Time will tell.

That made me wonder what Granny Smith would think of all this. Yep, she was an actual person. According to this article, she was born in England in 1799, and relocated to Australia when she was around 39. She and her husband had an orchard, and by all accounts she was renowned for her apple pies. In 1868 she saw a seedling growing on her creek, downstream from the compost pile where she threw the apple peels from a variety of apples that she used in her pies. In essence, the Granny Smith apple was created by accident. She cultivated the seedling, and died two years later.

I do love a good Granny Smith apple. And it has a memorable name. I think it would also have been fun if they named it after the location of her orchard. I’d eat a Kissing Point apple, wouldn’t you? Regardless, I’m glad to hear that at least some of her descendants have been millionaires due to Granny’s happy accident.

I also find it interesting that these beautiful green apples only made it to the U.S. in 1972. They’re the most popular apple sold in this country, and they feel like they’ve been around for my whole life. In order for an orchard to call their apples Granny Smiths, the original cuttings for their trees must have been taken from Granny’s original tree, which, apparently, still exists. So I guess now these farmers not only need these cuttings from Australia, but they may also have to kneel at the feet of Apple, Inc. in order to market them.

I wonder what Granny Smith would have to say about all this. Based on this image of her, I’d say she would be perfectly capable of giving this corporation a verbal beat-down. She looks like she didn’t suffer fools gladly. Apple, Inc. is lucky she’s long gone.

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