The Beatles Beat Latest Trademark Infringement

The Beatles may not have played together since their famous rooftop concert in January of 1969 for the Let It Be album but their legal team continues to battle on. Back in those crazy early days of Beatlemania, you could get pretty much anything Beatles: Beatles wigs, Beatles boots, Beatles toys, Beatles buttons, Beatles lunchboxes, Beatles Beatles Beatles!

Nowadays, though, it’s pretty much impossible to find the name Beatles on anything that hasn’t been put through the machinery of the band’s legal team at Apple Corps, Ltd. That team just marked a success in a case that has been dragging on since 2004 when a court decided it wasn’t cool for a Dutch manufacturer to churn out, um, Beatles wheelchair, according to The Hollywood Reporter. (OK, so only two members of the band are still around and the younger one, Paul McCartney, is 69. You don’t have to rub it in.)

You-Q BV wanted to trademark “Beatle,” but the court found that "even after 50 years of existence, (the band’s image is) still synonymous with youth and a certain counter-culture of the 1960s, an image which is still positive and which could specifically benefit the goods covered by the mark applied for." Nice try, You-Q. And you might want to skip that “Rolling Stone” plan B, too.