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[Simon Spero <ses AT tipper.oit.unc.edu>]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Gina Norman wrote:

> > Tell that to apple
>
> Actually, if I remember correctly from my J-school days, the rules around
> trademarks explicitly state that there must be potential for confusion

Apple vs. Apple was one of the major pieces of case law in the field;
as a result of the lawsuit, Apple Computer stopped putting hardware
synthesis chips in its computers, and made some other changes that sound
really silly now:

http://developer.apple.com/dev/techsupport/develop/issue28/vetneo.html

<<At some point in the distant past, Apple Computer reached an agreement
with the Beatle's record company, Apple Records, that allowed Apple
Computer to use the name "Apple" so long as it did not engage in certain
markets, such as music recording. At some later point in the distant past,
Apple Records sued Apple Computer, alleging certain violations of that
agreement. Suddenly, the lawyers at Apple Computer were intensely
interested in the sound and music capabilities of the Macintosh hardware
and system software.

At that moment, I happened to be finishing up the Sound Manager chapter of
Inside Macintosh Volume VI. Apple's lawyers decided that a number of API
elements smacked too much of music and needed therefore to be changed. For
instance, it was thought that since music is composed of individual notes,
the word note should not occur anywhere in the documentation in any
sound-related sense. As a result, what was hitherto known as the noteCmd
constant was changed to freqDurationCmd (the idea being that playing a
note is just playing a frequency for a specific duration). The legal
department demanded a number of other changes, which led to some
last-minute rewriting and reindexing as the book neared publication. And,
of course, the engineers had to issue new header files to reflect the new
names.>>