Historically, as several of the above links and examples demonstrate, McDonald’s has been particularly vigilant and vigorous in defending their trademarks and IP (which, honestly, you have to be, if you want to keep it), and they seem to have an entire legal team dedicated to finding instances which could be violations.
When I was in either high school or college (so, this was at least 30 years ago), there was a local, mom-and-pop restaurant in my home town of Green Bay, which had a sign in front of their restaurant that featured an arched arrow. It was just a single arch (with an arrow head on one end), it wasn’t yellow, and their restaurant name wasn’t anything even close to McDonald’s. Even so, they got a letter from the lawyers, insisting that the sign was a violation of McDonald’s logo, and that they remove it.
As it turned out, the sign predated McDonald’s use of the “golden arches” by years, and it was a pretty thin case anyway; once the local restaurant got the local TV stations involved in the case, and started generating bad press for McDonald’s, the demand was dropped.
There’s a clinic for plastic surgery called ‘McAesthetics’ in Cologne.
I think the general idea isn’t so much the association with McDonald’s, but rather, with the famous Scottish stinginess—so naming something McSomething essentially means ‘something, but cheap’.
I think it’s both. Just like McDonald’s has the reputation for consistency and liability, it stands for exceptionally cheap food, and the Mc prefix associated with Scotland and its alleged stinginess, which is a cliché and the source of many jokes in Germany, just reinforces this notion. In this way, “Mc” stands for cheap and basic, but reliable service.
Your quote cuts off my previous sentence, which makes it clear that I was looking for examples of lawsuits against home businesses, which Quality Inns definitely ain’t.
According to Google Maps, the street address of that place is in Terrell, not Kaufman. And it seems that it’s only the gas station, not the restaurant, that’s called McDonald’s. The photos show that the restaurant is called Three 65 Tacos & BBQ. So I think the words in the sign need to be interpreted separately, as “McDonald’s” (the name of the gas station) plus “Restaurant”, meaning “there is also a restaurant here”.
Nissan Motors (the car company) fought a long and bitter legal battle against Uzi Nissan, founder of Nissan Computer Corporation. Uzi Nissan had registered www.nissan.com and was using it for legit business purposes for several years before the car company even thought of making a website. In the end, Uzi Nissan was allowed to keep the website, provided he didn’t badmouth Nissan Motors. As it turns out, Mr. Nissan died last summer from COVID, so unless he’s heavily prepaid his domain hosting fees, we’ll probably see www.nissan.com roll over to the car company before long.
That might well be the case these days, but it first got my attention about five years ago on a billboard visible driving on I-20 that said “McDonald’s Family Restaurant.”