Intellectual property disputes over patents, copyrights and naming rights sometimes pits corporate heavyweights against each other in court.
One notable longtime battle over trademarks involved the iconic rock band The Beatles' holding company Apple Corps and Apple Computers (AAPL), dating back to 1978. The case was settled after The Beatles' music company agreed to never go into the computer business nor use the rainbow apple with a bite out of it logo, while Apple Computers agreed to pay about $80,000 and never go into the music business or used the record company's green apple or half apple logo. So much for that agreement, as we would learn years later.
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Apple Corps would further sue Apple Computers in 1991 after the company added sound capability to its computers. The computer company paid Apple Corps $26.5 million and the companies this time agreed that Apple Computers could deal in digital music, but would not sell or distribute physical music products, such as cassettes (remember those?) and compact discs or CDs (some of those are still around), according to the Pace University website.
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Apple Computers Finally Won Its Trademark Battle
Then, 20 years ago in 2003, Apple Corps came at Apple Computers again in court over the iTunes software and iTunes Music Store believing these technologies were a breach their previous agreement, but the computer company had good insight about the future when they secured the right to deal in digital music. The High Court of Justice in the UK ruled in favor of Apple Computers that digital music was a different market than physical music and the past agreement didn't cover distribution of digital music.
Electric vehicle manufacturers Nio (NIO) and Volkswagen's Audi have been in a trademark battle since June 2022, when Audi filed a lawsuit in a German court alleging an infringement of its trademark rights at the European Patent Office after Nio named two of its EV models ES6 and ES8. The German automaker believes Nio's model names are too similar to its S6 and S8 model names.
The Munich Regional Court in January ruled in Audi's favor, asserting that Nio's ES6 and ES8 model names were too similar and could be confused with an Audi EV. The judge said that even though the names were different, the letter E in the model was not enough to differentiate between the two companies' models, since Nio's model could be confused with the electric Audi model, Electrek reported.
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Under the ruling, Chinese EV maker Nio could not advertise the ES6 and ES8 in Germany and faced a fine of 250,000 euros (about $270,000) or up to six months in prison for the managing director of Nio Germany. The ES6 and ES8 are not currently available in Germany.
Nio, however, won a ruling from the European Union Intellectual Property Office on Feb. 21, which rejected Audi's trademark infringement request and found that Nio's ES6 and ES8 and Audi's S6 and S8 do not constitute a likelihood of confusion, CnEVPost reported. The ruling means that Nio's ES6 and ES8 model trademarks are valid in the European Union, unless Audi overturns the ruling.
