[martinkallstrom]

Okay, I'll try to explain. It is a reasonable question. First, it's important to understand that trademarks are unique among kinds of intellectual properties because they are valid in all eternity if you continue to use them. Patents and copyrights are at least supposed to expire. Not trademarks.

Now let's say you are managing a team of highly coveted people with the task of protecting the Apple brand world wide and for all eternity. What is the biggest threat you can identify? Is it that Samsung will suddenly launch the Samsung Apple phone? No.

Trademark dilution laws are in place only for very famous brands, and dilution is for brands what erosion is for mountain tops. Apple wants their brand to remain strong for 200 years and more. During that time natural erosion will have completely reshaped our cities and landscapes. Our language will have changed many times over and many of the idioms and sayings we use now will be incomprehensible to most people. It is in this environment that Apple the brand must survive.

A modern skyscraper has a theoretical infinite lifetime because it is constantly maintained. Otherwise it would erode and break down in a couple of decades. In a similar way will a brand erode in the minds of people if not properly maintained. Basically what happens is that the brand over time becomes associated with a general category of products instead of a specific manufacturer. So that when someone says "I'm thinking of buying an Apple, can you recommend a good model?", no one any longer thinks she actually means a device manufactured by Apple. It's like ordering a Coke and getting a Pepsi without reflecting on the difference.

So you are the brand manager. The biggest threat you have identified spells long-term dilution. You think about the term "Apple". It is different from let's say "Coca-Cola" because it's also a fruit. How do you factor this into your anti-dilution strategy compared to the brand manager at Coca-Cola? Are you more afraid of dilution than they are? Or do you think that the existence of the namesake fruit will help protecting you from dilution?

No matter what your decision would be, Apple's brand division has clearly decided that they need to be more thorough than most brands. It might be their culture or strategy, but if anything it is a sign of thinking long-term and risk-averse.

And when people say "how can they act like this, don't they know that apple is a fruit?", my theory is that they are completely aware of the fact and it actually makes them more anal than they would have been if their brand would have been Xcrublbob.

[darklajid]

Thanks for these insights.

Can you explain how your previous (paraphrased) "people might not understand that the market forces Apple to act like this" and your (well explained, again my words not yours) "Apple might intentionally _decide_ to fight every remote chance of trademark violation because they chose a common word as a trademark in the first place" fit together?

I get your explanation here. I don't think that this should be valid and don't agree with the actions taken obviously, as stated a couple times in the thread. But you make a good point explaining possible reasons to go down that route. However, if they _decide_ to go down that route - just to be safe - following the same thoughts as yours, aren't we back at the 'company acts evil' starting point? The one that you wanted to dismiss or weaken when you claimed that they might be _forced_ to act in this particular way?

Deliberate or not, what's your position now?

[martinkallstrom]

What I am fumbling to get across is that good vs. evil is a far too simplistic model to even remotely fit reality. Everybody exist and works within extremely complicated systems and relationships. And to make it even more confusing, we tend to think short-term when we judge others but long-term when we make our own decisions. And almost all differences in opinions comes down to short-term vs long-term thinking.

Imagine these three poor guys now fighting for survival while battling Apple in court. It is to me not at all unimaginable that they some day find a 12 year old boy standing outside their restaurant with a sack of apples, selling them to by-passers for a dollar each. And that they proceed to kick the boy away with snide remarks about how he should know better. I can also imagine a bystander asking them, "Why would you do that, there is no harm to your restaurant from a boy selling apples outside" and them replying "Yeah he's a nice kid. But if we let him be the municipality might think that it is us that are selling fruit in the street. We already had problems with our business permit, and with this huge Apple litigation on top of it, we don't want any more trouble."

The bystander thinks that in short-term there is no harm at all having a kid outside selling apples. The restaurant owners think long-term and decides that they don't want it to be the beginning of a development they can't control. Both perspectives are valid although as outsiders we think that the long-term risks the restaurant owners worry about are grossly overstated and we don't have the insight to begin with. But they might be right to take a small risk of bad publicity to mitigate what they see as big risk in months or years to come. Nobody knows beforehand.

It is not that they (Apple or our imaginary restaurant owners) are forced to take this course of action. But they act in a system where they see it as the right thing to do. And that doesn't make them evil. Evil would be to go out of their way to harm others for no other reason than the inherent joy in doing so. It doesn't fit into my world view that Apple or any large corporation is doing that [insert specific exception to that rule here for a clever pun, i.e. "except Facebook, they are evil to the bone"].

And: I'm not saying that the imaginary situation above is exactly the same as the real one here. It is just an illustration of how we as bystanders never really knows what goes into a decision.

[sukuriant]

Thank you for the insight. That honestly really cleared things up.