The New York Times website has links to the 1991 trademark agreement and the settlement agreement
In section 1.3 of that agreement, Apple Corps (the record company) claims dominion over “any current or future creative works whose principal content is music and/or musical performances; regardless of the means by which those works are recorded, or communicated, whether tangible or intangible;”
Sounds pretty all-inclusive. I’d have to say that iTunes qualifies as a creative work whose principal content is music, and iPods are primarily a venue for musical performances.
Not sure if anyone else has pointed this out… but Apple is very careful to “brand” their music business with “iTunes” and never “Apple.”
Depending on whom you ask, this is either to abide by the agreement or to defend against a lawsuit on technical terms.
I can. Apple Corp. doesn’t sell anybody’s music except for that of the Beatles. Actually, it doesn’t even sell them retail — as iTunes Music Store does to customers — it licenses Beatles stuff. For what it’s worth, even though it’s it’s own “label,” the music is still sold through EMI (in England) and Capitol (in the US).
As I mentioned in the OP, this thread has (or was supposed to have) nothing to do with the legality over the breach of agreement. My question is how are the ex-Beatles or their family poorer for the existence of iPod/iTMS? Do you know what I mean? Is there some concievable scenario where the Beatles’ Apple Corp. was set to take the world by storm with it’s new music player and online music store, but was trumped by the computer company?
Wheras “The Beatles” are known around the world, the record company they set up a year before they disbanded is not. Apart from their BBC and Anthology releases, even the Beatles own discs carry either the EMI/Parlophone or Capitol label. I have a really really hard time believing that people are confusing the content on the iTMS as being part of the Beatles catalog.
If you guys want to talk legal, fine. I just opened this thread to discuss what harm the ex-Beatles recieved by the existence of the iPod/iTMS.
In my opinion, the ex-Beatles’ families weren’t doing anything with their all-but-dead property and then along comes Jobs, who introduces some pretty significant technology to the music world (which I think both the music press and technology press agreee on, and which I think most music listeners have enjoyed). And this sort of thing is supposed to be punished?
To me, it seems like the ex-Beatles families are sniffing around not for money they worked for, but money just for the sake of having more money. Given that I’m typing this after just having watched “Lost,” they remind me of Sawyer sitting on a bag of medicine when other people on the island are getting sick.
When somebody steals your property, you don’t have to prove that you were harmed by the theft or show how much you were harmed or demonstrate that you were making better use of it than the person who took it.
They didn’t steal it. They made one that’s completely different than yours yet is named similarly.
By the way… Pixar has been asking around about you.
Hush my mouth! You were along WAY before they made that movie! Dude, I think you should file a lawsuit!
I see some signs of this becoming technical.
Moved from IMHO to GD.
You seem to be under the completely mistaken impression that the individuals in the group and their families want money from Steve Jobs. This could not be further from reality. It is a legal matter. It was on the day Jobs signed the agreement. It was the first time he got taken to court for breaching it. And the second. And the third. And if he doesn’t stop breaching it, it will be a legal matter for years to come.
Apple Corps business is not carried out by Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr, nor anyone in the estates of John Lennon or George Harrison. It is carried on by precisely the people John did not want running Apple: “men in suits sitting around on their fat arses in The City.” It’s a show put on by and for lawyers.
The Beatles’ catalogue remains the most valuable property in the music industry. Apple’s aim is to see its importance preserved and not diluted or sullied in any way. “The Beatles” is a registered trademark now. Apple owns the copyright to the name, and the catalogue, which they license exclusively to EMI. It is their mission to keep the name and the music among the prestige items in the world. That’s why you can’t get mp3 downloads of The Beatles. That’s why none of their EMI recordings have ever been on a K-Tel or Ronco album. That’s why the vast majority of their music is not used to sell orange juice or soap or cars. If ever the songs are used for this, you will not hear the original recordings. When Wacko bought Northern Songs from ATV, he started licensing songs for commercials, to the great dismay of Apple and the composers and other people.
The Beatles are still a multimillion dollar business empire, and some of the best legal people in the world administer it. You can’t fuck with them. They have too much money and too much power in business. This brings us full circle. Steve Jobs said he’d stay out of music if they let him use the name. Now he’s in the music business. He’ll get out, or he’ll pay. Simple.
Damn straight. Pixar better watch their ass.
Well, yeah. I can’t quite understand how you could agree that it shouldn’t be punished. Person A owns something but isn’t currently using it. Person B comes along and starts using it against the express wishes of person A. And you are arguing that no punishment is due? Bizarre.
Imagine I bought a block of land in a remote location in 1965 but haven’t even a visited at for 40 years. You are arguing that because Steve Jobs has a lot of money and my family wasn’t doing anything with the land he has the right to build a Starbucks on the site.
That’s pseudo-socialist bullshit. I paid for that property legally and with my money. It is mine. If the only use it gets is giving me a warm glow then that is a valid use because it’s mine. And if I want to hold onto it as a speculative investment because one day it might become valuable then that is also a valid use. The idea that Jobs shouldn’t be punished at all for building a Starbucks on my property is just bizarre.
Sure, the name apple is intellectual property or something, nonetheless it is still property. It is the right of the owners to use that property however they see fit. If they want to preserve it as a memorial to The Beatles then they have the right to do so without Jobs shitting on that memorial. And if they want to hold onto it in the belief that one day the property will become a valuable commodity and they will be able to sell it for big bucks they also have that right. They were lucky or far-sighted enough to purchase the property first. If Jobs wants it he has to buy it. And if he can’t offer enough money to buy it then he doesn’t have the right to just start using it against the owners wishes.
That’s how a free society works. We have a name for using someone else’s property against their wishes. It is called theft. Just because you promise to return if they want to use it doesn’t make it any less theft. “I was only borrowing it” has never been a valid defence in any court in the world AFAIK.
Since this has been moved to GD Hey you! this would be a good point for you to explain why Jobs’ actions shouldn’t be punished and how his actions don’t harm Apple Corps. You seem to have begun with an implicit assumption that no harm is done by Jobs using someone else’s property against their expressly stated wished. I really can’t see how you can justify such assumption. But I’m wiling to listen.
How far do you extend this pseudo-socialist principle that idle property can be claimed by anyone who has a better use for it? Should Jobs be able to walk into a museum and walk out with any items that aren’t on public display? After all they weren’t using them. How about the Beatles song catalogue? Should Jobs be able to record and market any songs that aren’t currently commercially available on the grounds that they aren’t being used well by the families. I really would be interested in hearing where you draw the line on private property ownership, and why.
In addition to the other arguments given in this thread: Apple Computer’s iTunes music store hampers Apple Records’ ability to launch an online music service, AppleMusic.com, that would make available the entire catolog of Badfinger music, as well as the lesser known Beatles catolog, available for download at just $0.99 US per song. The similarities in name is expected to cause confusion for customers resulting in a loss of [insert figure here] dollars of revenue.
Furthermore, potential buyers of Apple Records will no longer pay a premium for the Apple Records name, since it has been diluted with Apple Computers.
Additionally, I didn’t see it mentioned yet in this thread, but I believe US law requires one to actively protect their registered marks or risk losing them. I don’t know if this is true with UK or international law.
Now these answers are in regard to losses to Apple Records and not ex-Beatles, but as fishbicycle points out, the two are not identical.
Doesn’t Xerox and Coca Cola (“Coke”) protect their brand names for just this reason? Remember cellophane? Linoleum? I believe both were lost to the public domain because their owners did not actively protect them.
In the same vein, IIRC, there is at least one street within the Rockefeller complex in NYC that is not a public street. The Rockefeller Center apparently closes that street at least one day a year to all traffic to protect its ownership.
But Apple is still the antecedent of their in your own sentence. It’s Apple’s music business.
But the Apple label was a biggie in its day (in terms of recognition) and its association with the Beatles was widely known. Apple Computers didn’t just pull the name out of thin air. They negotiated for its use for good reason.
All-but-dead?
In Dec, 2005, EMI & Apple Corps went to court over $60 million in royalties that EMI allegedly shortchanged Apple. I can’t find how much they actually did pay to Apple for the year.
But if that’s what you call all-but-dead … boy, I could get on well owning just a piece of such a ‘dead’ property!
Sorry, but I can’t buy the trademark “stealing” quite as lock stock and barrel as some are asking here. The whole point of trademark infringement is someone trying to make money off value you created in a name, because people will wrongly associate things. But in many cases, similar names don’t necessarily infringe upon each other, because no such confusion applies. Often this rests on whether the brands can relaly be confused and are in the same market. Apple the record company makes money off of the Beatles catelog. Apple the company makes money off of software and hardware that play and vend music. Whether or not these two really conflict and can or are confused by anyone is what’s in dispute, and it’s not 100% clear one way or the other. Hence, the lawsuit.
And if anything, something of the exact opposite is happening here. An organization known primarily for an entirely different name (the Beatles) is siphoning off value from one that actually created value for an Apple brand itself, one pretty hard to confuse with Apple Corps in any substantive way.
Unfortunately for Apple, none of that reasonability much matters, because however stupid it was, Apple signed a trade agreement and settled in the first place. The settlement nonwithstanding, there does seem to be a legitimate dispute over whether a promise not to distribute musical media applies to selling songs online and if it were really so simple as people are making it out to be, Apple would have had to settle all of this immediately anyway.
Still it’s hard to see Apple Corps as being entirely reasonable here in what they demanded, and hard to see Apple as being anything but foolish in not forseeing this issue and trying to buy off a better agreement. Heck, the best thing would be for one to buy out the other and just end the whole idiotic mess.
When all of this first began, Apple Corps was doing things like complaing that the system event bleeps on Apple computers were “too musical.” And they really got angry when lo and behold, Apple computers were given the capability of having speakers hooked up to them. Give me a friggin break. Like Apple was going to be able to compete while producing computers without any sound capability to face off with Microsoft? What were their choices? This was a trainwreck waiting to happen, and they should have come to some new agreement long ago to avoid it.
I agree with some of what you’re saying. But the overall message I get from this legal morass is that Jobs was foolish to use the name Apple in the first place. If I was starting up a mattress company next week, I wouldn’t call it MicroSoft and hope for the best that Bill Gates and I never entered into any competing markets.