Publisher Sues Apple Over iBooks Trademark

The busiest people in the Apple corporate structure have to be the legal team. These guys and gals are constantly fighting off suits and filing suits for one reason or another. The legal team at Apple only recently settled with Nokia for patent infringement and now another suit has been filed against the corporation. A publisher in New York filed a trademark infringement suit against Apple this week. The publisher is John T. Colby.

Colby says that he purchased the assets of various entities formerly owned by another publisher named Byron Preiss in 2006 and 2007. Preiss had published more than 1000 hardcover and paperback books under the ibooks name as far back as 1999. Apple has a trademark on the IBOOK brand and sold a computer using the iBook name long ago.

The suit says that Apple didn't start using iBook for actually selling digital books until the iPad came around. Apparently, the use of iBook to sell books was the final straw for Colby and he filed suit. The lawsuit claims, "Apple's use of the mark 'iBooks' to denote the electronic library that can be accessed via its iPad tablet computer and its iPhone is likely to overwhelm the good will of plaintiffs' 'ibooks' and 'ipicturebooks' marks and render them virtually worthless."

[via Bloomberg]