“A New York street artist filed a cease-and-desist letter to Apple, claiming their new ad campaign for the iPhone 5s uses his trademarked slogan,” Barbara Ross reports for The New York Daily News.
“James De La Vega says he’s been using the phrase, ‘You are more powerful than you think,’ for almost a decade as part of his ‘Become Your Dream’ series,” Ross reports. “The Cornell University grad with a degree in fine arts has chalked his slogans onto sidewalks, painted them into murals and even incorporated them into a graffiti motif that designer Tory Burch used recently for a line of handbags and fashion accessories.”
“De La Vega said the slogan is so widely associated with him that when a company called Quotable Cards Inc. recently decided to market a collection of quotable magnets featuring the sayings of living instead of dead people, they got De La Vega’s permission to use the ‘powerful’ quote,” Ross reports. “Richard Garbarini, De La Vega’s lawyer, recently sent Apple the cease-and-desist letter demanding that Apple acknowledge that it has violated De La Vega’s rights as the ‘common law owner of the trademark.’ Garbarini’s letter says De La Vega wants to avoid a lawsuit by negotiating a settlement. ‘Words are weapons,’ De La Vega said. ‘This is my way of building a movement. (Apple) should pay me because I created it and they’ve used it to creation national excitement about a product and huge profits for themselves.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A mind is a terrible thing to waste®. And vice versa.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
