SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Apple Computer today announced that it has filed a trademark violation lawsuit against Richard Stallman, the original author of Emacs and founder of the Free Software Foundation, for infringing the plural form of their trademark “eMac“.

“Richard Stallman is intentionally infringing the plural form of our popular eMac trademark with his text editing software. Apple vigorously pursues all parties who infringe our brands and marks, including parties that don’t.”

“Some might argue that Emacs was written in 1976, predating the eMac, the Macintosh, and Apple, and that our trademark should not apply. But, like Emacs, an eMac can be used to edit text, so there’s clearly a deliberate attempt to mislead the text editing public, who might think that by installing Emacs, they’re getting the design aesthetic and user interface that Apple popularized. Our critics fail to realize that Mr. Stallman made a conscious and deliberate decision to continue distributing his product without changing the name even after he found out that we had registered a similar mark. It is this deliberate act that is the basis of our suit.”

Apple has also indicated that it will be suing the Beatles label Apple Records for trademark infringement now that the company is in the business of distributing recordings of music.