Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), won today an extremely important lawsuit against Xiaomi, one of the companies that copied it step by step in recent years and that has been very successful thanks to this. In 2014, Xiaomi submitted an application to the European authorities to register the name as a trademark Mi Pad, but of course Apple objected due to the fact that the name is very similar to the iPad, already registered as a trademark.
3 years after that moment, a European court won the Apple case, officially confirming the fact that the guys from China specialized in theft, not innovation, as everyone already knows. Xiaomi quietly sells the Mi Pad in China, where intellectual property has no value, and Apple cannot stop it, but in Europe and the US things are different.
Apple has now won a victory against Xiaomi and the name Mi Pad cannot be registered as a trademark because by pronouncing it, customers can easily confuse it with iPad. Although Apple blocked Xiaomi's action from this point of view, it did not ask for a ban on the sale of Mi Pad tablets in Europe, although with this decision behind it, it could do so at any time.
"The dissimilarity between the signs at issue, resulting from the presence of the additional letter 'm' at the beginning of "Mi Pad", is not sufficient to offset the high degree of visual and phonetic similarity between the two signs,"
Xiaomi can appeal the decision at the European Court of Justice, but it is unlikely that it will succeed in winning anything because European legislation is much tougher in terms of intellectual theft.
