The Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker has cleared a major hurdle after a dispute with VW’s Audi.
Intellectual property disputes over patents, copyrights, and naming rights sometimes pit corporate heavyweights against each other in court.
A notable longstanding battle over trademarks involved the iconic rock band The Beatles, holding company Apple Corps, and Apple Computers. (AAPL) – Get a free report, dating back to 1978. The case was settled after The Beatles’ music company agreed never to go into the computer business or use the rainbow-bitten apple logo, while Apple Computers agreed to pay about $ 80,000 and never got into the music business or used the green apple or half apple logo of the record company. 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 this time the companies agreed that Apple Computers could trade in digital music, but it would not sell or distribute physical music products, such as cassettes (remember those?) and compact discs or CD (some of those still exist), 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 went to Apple Computers again in court over the iTunes and iTunes Music Store software, believing that these technologies violated their previous agreement, but the computer company had a good outlook on the future when they claimed the right. to deal with digital music. The UK High Court of Justice ruled in favor of Apple Computers that digital music was a different market from physical music and that the previous agreement did not cover the distribution of digital music.
Electric vehicle manufacturers Nio (CHILD) – Get a free reportand Volkswagen’s Audi have been in a trademark battle since June 2022, when Audi filed a lawsuit in a German court alleging infringement of its trademark rights at the European Patent Office after Nio named two of its models. EV ES6 and ES8. The German automaker believes that the Nio’s model names are too similar to the S6 and S8 model names.
The Munich Regional Court ruled in January in favor of Audi, stating that the Nio’s ES6 and ES8 model names were too similar and could be confused with an Audi EV. The judge said that although the names were different, the letter E in the model was not enough to differentiate the models of the two companies, as the Nio model could be confused with Audi’s electric model. electrek reported.
Nio loses and then wins his trademark case
According to the ruling, Chinese electric vehicle 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 Nio’s CEO. Germany. The ES6 and ES8 are currently not available in Germany.
Nio, however, won a ruling from the European Union Intellectual Property Office on February 21, which rejected Audi’s trademark infringement request and found that Nio’s ES6 and ES8 and Audi’s S6 and S8 They do not constitute a likelihood of confusion. CnEVPost reported. The ruling means that the trademarks of Nio’s ES6 and ES8 models are valid in the European Union, unless Audi revokes the ruling.
