David against Goliath: the Italian Alisea sues Apple for “copied hi-tech pencils”
On May 29, an Italian SME, Alisea, will try to bite Apple in court. The reason for the dispute? A pencil…
It will be a singular duel fought to the edge of a pencil, the one between the Vicenza-based Alisea Srl, a company founded in 1994, and the Cupertino colossus Apple. Stuff about patents that are claimed to be infringed.
ALISEA CHALLENGES APPLE
The first hearing will be held in Venice on Monday 29 May. Alisea claims that the ApplePencil 2nd generation electronic stylus that can be used to write on technological devices would in fact have copied "Perpetua", an all-Vicenza invention, protected by a worldwide patent (therefore without territorial limits) since 2014.
«It is the battle of a small Italian pencil against the arrogance of a global giant». admits Susanna Martucci Fortuna, managing director and founder of Alisea srl to BresciaOggi , the newspaper that was the first to follow the case which, as the hours go by, is starting to cross regional borders, also affecting national newspapers.
WHAT IS PERPETUAL
Alisea's website is, like Apple products, essential but elegant. Here and there some programming errors betray the nature of a small company, perhaps not too accustomed to online, but it is clear that on Perpetua, the product that Apple according to them would have copied, they had bet a lot because it in turn has a site entirely his.
“Graphite – reads one of the product characteristics – in addition to being an excellent conductor of heat and sound, it is also an excellent conductor of electricity. And it is thanks to this characteristic that the graphite inside Perpetua is able to interact with tablets and smartphones. By removing Perpetua's eraser, its final part can be transformed into a capacitive stylus. And this thanks to the electrical conduction properties of the graphite with which it is made. However, the rubber can also be used separately”.
A pencil that is certainly not cheap: one unit costs 7.50 euros. You save something by buying 10: 65 euros. The second generation ApplePencil, however, costs more than double, 149 euros . But it does not contain graphite and, therefore, it cannot be tempered or even consumed: theoretically it has an infinite use.
The Perpetua pencil, on the other hand, is made of «zantech», an innovative material composed of 80% graphite, a residue from the Italian industrial production of electrodes for the electroerosion process, without the addition of protective varnishes, glues or subsequent processes.
The product from Vicenza can enjoy a life cycle 20 times higher than all other pencils and is also magnetic. An object so innovative that in 2016 it obtained the honorable mention at the Compasso d'Oro of the Association for Industrial Design (Adi) . One, namely the Italian one, is in short a product between past and present, for notepads and tablets, the other has been designed only for electronic devices. Apparently they are not so similar, yet…
THE REASON FOR THE DISPUTE
«We believe that "Apple", a giant, has illegitimately appropriated characteristics of our "Perpetua" for the production, marketing and advertising on the European market of the "ApplePencil 2 generation" product, thus violating its intellectual property rights and industry and engaging in conduct of unfair competition», explains the CEO of the Vicenza-based company who has been very attentive to sustainability issues since unsuspecting times, judging by the history of their press releases.
APPLE HAS SNUBBED ANY MEDIATION
Then again the managing director to Corriere points out: «We started the lawsuit because, while trying to be collaborative and attempt a discussion around a table, they preferred to leverage their status as a global giant, immediately unleashing their firepower, but we will not be intimidated. It will be the challenge of a small company against a giant. Too often we have seen Italian SMEs crushed by the world's big names».
The people of Vicenza are fierce: "We will use every tool that the law makes available to protect all companies, even the smallest ones". But Apple for its part has all the resources of a company that in the first three months of 2023 alone totaled profits of over 70 billion dollars and an annual turnover of 394.3 billion dollars . It really is David against Goliath: we will see what the Italian judiciary decides.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/davide-contro-golia-litaliana-alisea-fa-causa-ad-apple-per-matite-hi-tech-copiate/ on Thu, 25 May 2023 09:15:04 +0000.