Before InBev merged with/devoured Anheuser-Busch, A-B made all its own cans, and it was the world’s leader in aluminum recycling. InBev sold the can biz to Ball.
OK, you have a point. I agree they’re not trying to fool anyone. I have however seen plenty of ThinkPads clearly labeled Lenovo.
Cadbury chocolate sold in the U.S. is made by the Hershey company. Cadbury licensed the right to the Hershey name in 1988. Since then, Hershey has successfully sued to prevent the importation of British Cadbury chocolate into the U.S.
The credit card(s) in your wallet may not be issued by the bank whose name is on the card. Banks buy/sell/trade their credit card businesses like kids trading baseball trading cards.
You might be able to tell what bank you’re really doing business with if you read the fine print on your monthly statement, or in your credit card agreement. Maybe.
Example: I have had a HSBC credit card for years. I didn’t know it for a long time, but it was really a Capital One card even though it didn’t say that anywhere. At some point, HSBC actually bought back that business, and my HSBC card became an actual HSBC card. And still is, AFAIK.
It matters because different banks have different corporate cultures, different customer service policies if you have problems, different rules about things like dinging you for late payments, etc. When your credit card changes hands, even if your cardholder agreement technically doesn’t change, the kind of treatment you get from the company might.
Specific to GE, the GE Capital business still utilises the meatball but no longer has any ownership via the parent GE
Blank DVD manufacturers have been playing the name game for decades. There was a time when you bought Sony DVD blanks, they were manufactured by Sony, but like almost all DVD blank brands, they now contain whatever 2nd tier manufacturer they choose.
In the computer realm, Verbatim is notorious for their deceptive marketing of their recordable DVDs. Beware of new Verbatim non-AZO packaging - VideoHelp Forum
TL;DR link. In ~2017-2018, Verbatim started packaging their 2nd tier “Life Series” DVD blanks in the same packaging as their 1st tier AZO blanks with only change being the small “Life Series” text and the lack of the AZO logo.*
*AZO is a proprietary dye exclusive to Verbatim that is superior to almost all other dyes (better dye = better burn quality and disc longevity). Only Verbatim AZO and Taiyo Yuden DVD blanks are 1st tier, all other discs are 2nd tier (questionable burn quality and longevity). I’m purposely leaving out M-Disc because their claims of 100 or 1000 year life is still unproven in the real world. M-Disc has only been around since 2009.
To further confuse matters, several years ago, Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden (the only other 1st tier DVD blank manufacturer) sold all rights to their proprietary manufacturing and dye formulas to CMC Magnetics which is the #1 manufacturer of the majority of 2nd tier DVD blanks. For now, they’re still making discs according to the original formulas and specs, but it’s unknown if/when they may change and start marketing their 2nd tier products under the Taiyo-Yuden name. Thankfully, AZO refers to the proprietary dye and AFAIK, can’t be used on products which don’t use it.
The strange case of DVDFab.
DVDFab is a DVD rip program which allows you to bypass the copy protection on commercial DVD, Blu-Ray and UHD discs and make an exact backup copy.
In 2016, Slysoft, the developer of DVDFab received a Cease and Desist order for the program. Slysoft agree and closed down their company and website, DVDFab.com. Within months, a new company, RedFox and a new website DVDFab.cn rose from from the ashes. Since RedFox and the website based entirely in China, they’re beyond the reach of U.S. laws.
The “truth” (never fully verified) behind RedFox was revealed when “Lifetime” subscribers to the program were denied an upgrade to the latest version because RedFox claims they weren’t the owners of Slysoft, but just developers who took the code with them after Slysoft completely shut their doors without notice.
DVDFab in its various incarnations continues to this day, updated and developed by the original programmers, but its links to Slysoft are completely gone.
A note about warranties, especially “Lifetime Warranties”, which is generally known, but I’ll pass this along… When a company/brand name is sold, especially because of bankruptcy, the obligation of honoring the warranty may not be kept by the new owner.
This is a common issue with solar power companies that are constantly going out of business because of changing tax incentives and approvals by local electric companies. Often the only warranty the homeowners have is the manufacturers on the products themselves.
"## 27 Jun Warranty Claims Against A Bankrupt Company
"Posted at 08:09h in Bankruptcy Basics by L. Jed Berliner, Western & Central Massachusetts Consumer Lawyer 0 Comments
You may have purchased something from a company now in bankruptcy, and you have to make a warranty claim.
If the company is in Chapter 11, it will very likely honor your claim for the good will it generates (you’ll tell your friends that it’s okay to do business with the company) even though the company may not have to, because your warranty contract existed before the bankruptcy was filed.
If the company is in Chapter 7, the buyer of the bankrupt company’s assets might honor your warranty claim for the same good will reason, even though it doesn’t have to.
Otherwise, you’re out of luck. This wasn’t a ripoff, this was just the bad luck of doing business with a company that didn’t make it. You’ve lost your warranty. The owners lost a significant asset, and the workers lost their jobs"
https://bankruptcylawnetwork.com/warranty-claims-against-a-bankrupt-company/
There are businesses where the warranty is guaranteed by an insurance company. I don’t know of any … but we had to have that kind of insurance when we were bidding for some kinds of contracts.
Successfully?
One of Pepper Mill’s addictions is the Cadbury Bourneville Dark Chocolate Bar, which differs significantly from the Cadbury Chocolate bar sold in the US. Whenever I’ve gone abroad to the UK, I stock up on them for her.
But I can get the same bars here at stores specializing in British foods and in some gourmet shops. I’ve picked up some recently as stocking stuffers. The Bourneville bars are indistinguishable from those from the UK, and I don’t think they’re made here. Clearly Hershey isn’t preventing importation of Cadbury Bourneville chocolate bars. Even if they may be restricting it.
Heck, you can even buy them on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Cadburys-Bournville-Dark-Chocolate-180g/dp/B013P2ZMP2
Sometimes the licensing agreements cover which “distribution channels” a company is allowed to use. For example, Hershey might have exclusive rights to sell their Cadbury in grocery stores, but Cadbury Candbury might have kept the rights to sell in candy shops.
The Amazon listing seems like a grey market thing.
I work for a large retailer (hundreds of stores, billions in sales). We could not source UK made Cadbury’s for sale in our stores. We do have a British/Irish foods section in some stores. The products there are a mixture of imported (PG Tips tea, HP Sauce) and US made (e.g. Cadbury’s).
If MiniAtlas wants real Smarties or a Flake bar, I have to go to a small store that specializes in British/Irish foods and I assume imports in quantities too small to get the attention of the IP owners.
Small nitpick: Aspirin became genericized as one of the bits of the Treaty of Versailles. Bayer was forced to release the popular drug into the world with no copyright or patent, and thus, Aspirin the generic painkiller was born.
Yeah you beat me to it, Aspirin was a Bayer product. There was no Aspirin company.
I have a fun one for this.
Several years back, I was working at Del Monte Foods. At the time, Del Monte was owned by KKR, one of those big companies that buys and sells bits and pieces of companies.
Back in the 1990’s, Del Monte had sold off a chunk of their tropical fruit business to a company in the Phillipines, who also leased the usage of the name “Del Monte Pacfic Limited”.
After much trials and tribulations, Del Monte was split into 2 separate companies, one that was people food, and one that was pet food/products, as Del Monte had been used to buy up Meow Mix and Milkbone. After we started the process of dividing the IT systems, we were informed that the people food half of the company was being sold.
To Del Monte Pacific Limited. *
The pet food stuff was rolled up into a single business called “Big Hearts Pet Brands”. KKR sold that one to Smuckers, last I heard, and made a tidy profit all along the way.
*to be fair, they are sourcing all their stuff from the same places, just the profit goes to a HQ in the Philippines.
I did some mergers and acquisition work early in my career (and later as well, big companies are always buying and selling big companies, and the three corporate departments I’ve spent my career in - Tax, IT and Legal - tend to be in the middle of them). The strangest one was when General Mills (brand Betty Crocker) bought Pillsbury, but that would create too big a monopoly on cake mixes, so the Pillsbury name for most Pillsbury products (and most of the rest of the portfolio) went to General Mills. But cake mixes went to International Multifoods, which was later bought by Smuckers - so the Pillsbury brand is co-owned by two companies who coordinate on the Pillsbury Doughboy (or at least did at the time of the sale).
Do you have a cite for that? I’ve never before heard that it had anything to do with the Treaty of Versailles.
Several marketing textbooks I’ve used in my classes give this as a classic case study of what happens when you don’t enforce your trademark.
I don’t have time to dig up the marketing texts, but certainly a quick Wiki makes no mention at all of the Treaty of Versailles. Was that perhaps specific to certain countries only?
Bayer lost its trademark for Aspirin in the United States in actions taken between 1918 and 1921 because it had failed to use the name for its own product correctly and had for years allowed the use of “Aspirin” by other manufacturers without defending the intellectual property rights.[59] Today, aspirin is a generic trademark in many countries
Per G. Tsoucalas, M. Karamanou, G. Androutsos: “Travelling through Time with Aspirin, a Healing Companion”,
In 1915, Aspirin manufactured in tablet form became available without a prescription. As soon as the First World War ended and Germany surrendered, Bayer had to give away its registered trademark of Aspirin. Thus “Aspirin” became a generic name in the countries that emerged as winners of the war but remained a registered trademark of Bayer in countries like Germany, Mexico, Canada and over 80 other countries.
Very little that goes under the Virgin brand is actually owned by Richard Branson. Virgin Media was bought by Liberty Global a few years ago.
That doesn’t seem quite right. Canada fought on the side of the Allies in World War I.
It actually does say Lenovo in the lower-left corner, beneath the screen. I happen to have a model very similar in appearance to this one and mine has the same logo in the same spot. “Lenovo” is also printed on the bottom of the laptop and when you turn the machine on, “Lenovo” is the first thing you see (provided you don’t mess around with the start-up).
That being said, it’s a fact that when Lenovo first acquired the ThinkPad trademark, they were even allowed to use the IBM logo for a period of time. The following link will take you to an image of a ThinkPad with both the Lenovo and IBM trademarks on it.
https://laptopmountain.com/products/lenovo-thinkpad-t60-linux