One of the downsides to being dead is that you don’t get much of a say in how your image is used. Like, for years and years, Apple’s “Think Different” campaign used the images of famous dead people and Ted Turner to sell computers. Well, now those different-thinking chickens have come home to roost as Apple has to sit back and watch Steve Jobs jeans take Europe by storm.
Yes, as reported by the New York Daily News, the Italian fashion company Steve Jobs has won a lawsuit brought by Apple over their use of the name Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple whom the company once pushed out and then brought back once they realized he was the only person in the building with any good ideas. The founders of Steve Jobs realized Apple hadn’t trademarked the name Steve Jobs, probably because of the firing, and trademarked the name themselves.
Despite Apple’s attempts, the European courts have granted the brothers the right to use the name — and logo: a J with a bitten chunk and a leaf dotting it, in a familiar design.
It’s this design that may have doomed Apple’s attempt at reclaiming the name. According to Business Insider Italia, Apple focused on the logo and because the J isn’t a fruit, the brothers told the outlet, the chunk cannot be a bite, as in the Apple logo.
That is a very specific ruling. That judge went to college and three years of law school and worked in the judicial system and finally got promoted to a judicial appointment and came into the courtroom, looked around, and with the totality of his legal expertise he looked at the facts in the case and said “You can’t eat a letter of the alphabet,” solving one of the most complex legal questions of our age.
Compounding this loss for Apple is the fact that they’re facing a spate of lawsuits over the deliberate slowing down of older phones, one which could see Apple executives facing potential jail time in France, where planned obsolescence of electronics is a crime. And that’s on top of cutting processing power by letting the camera just use one face for every Asian person.