Apple Records corners the market on greed

Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's record label has hauled Apple Computer into court repeatedly over the past couple of decades.

Basically, any time Apple Computer does anything new with Music, Apple Records sues them again for it.

At this point, nobody remembers Apple Records because record label names aren't important. How many people remember that the Beatles original label was Capital Records?

The only way you could be reminded the name - is if you picked up an album and looked at the sticker in the center of the record. Oh, wait. No records have come out on vinyl in the past ten years!

As BBC says, Apple giants do battle in court:

The computer company's logo is an apple with a section removed out of the side. The record company is represented by a complete green Granny Smith apple.

The average person has a working vocabulary of only ten or twenty thousand words There are a heck of a lot more than twenty thousand companies in the world! Lawsuits like this are silly.

Apple never uses the word Record in any of its products or advertisements. Chances of mixing up an Apple Computer product or service with any Apple Records product are zero.

A word like Apple alone does not distinguish a company in the 21st century, if it ever did. World population is well over six billion. Number of corporations in existence at this point has got to be over a million. Average person's vocabulary not much beyond 20,000 words - if even that.

So of course companies have to use some of the same words in their name!! There is simply no other choice. That is why The computer company calls itself Apple Computer, and the record company has always called itself Apple Records.

Now, the Record company is going a step further. They are saying any image of any apples infringes on their trademark. Give me a break. The two company's trademark symbols do not bear any resemblance to each other. They never had.

I would love to see the McCartney lawyers walking through an art museum, taking notes:

Hmmm... painting of serpent and an apple in the garden of Eden, and it's a very popular work these days... infringing on the trademark terribly. But it was drawn hundreds of years ago! No excuse, we own the trademark now.

Surrealist portrait of man in a bowler hat with a green Apple as a head, same color even. But it is just a painting, and Apple's do exist in the tens of billions in the real world!

Somebody should sue Apple Records for appropriating the use of the Granny Smith Apple invented in Australia for use of their corporate logo. It was invented almost a century before the McCartney and Eastman family decided to shroud it in legal protections!!

Mrs. Smith, who invented it, was at least in the apple-growing business. Steve Jobs at least earned a living picking Apple's in an Oregon orchard during his boyhood. What member of the McCartney or Eastman family - or any Beatle's - ever owned an orchards or picked Apple's for a living?

Now that this thing is back in court, I say it is time for some give-back by Apple Records to Apple Computer. Some of that money from previous lawsuits ought to be returned to Apple Computer, the company who earned it.

I read in an article once that Paul McCartney's nickname as a boy was Mac. Should the McCartney family be able filch a portion of Apple Macintosh computer because they share one syllable of their name with each other? NO!

That would be silly. And so is this lawsuit.

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