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This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
The owner of a chicken shop in northern England has lost his long-running legal dispute with Elon Musk’s Tesla.
Amanji Ali’s Tesla Chicken & Pizza takeaway shop in Bury, Greater Manchester, has been at the center of a trademark dispute with an electric car company.
Last November, Ali was ordered to pay Tesla 4,000 pounds ($5,053) after Britain’s Intellectual Property Office finally sided with the car giant.
Ali registered the Takeaway trademark in May 2022, citing inventor Nikola Tesla as the inspiration for the name, the BBC reported.
When asked about his unusual inspiration, he told the outlet: “He was kind of an intelligent guy…When I was younger, I…used to read about him and look at pictures of him.”
According to documents released by the IPO, Tesla did not initially object to the trademark, but in November 2021 Ali was notified that the car company had requested international protection for the trademark in the UK food and beverage category.
Ali opposed the request, fearing the company would try to invalidate Takeaway’s trademark. Nearly a year later, Tesla did just that, claiming that Ali’s trademark took unfair advantage of the EV company’s established reputation.
Representatives for Tesla did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment outside of normal business hours.
After another year of arguments, Ali ultimately lost the case.
He told the BBC he had intended to appeal the decision but had already spent around £8,000 in legal costs and was suffering from the stress of the dispute. Ali added that the fight with Tesla has affected his sleep and work habits.
“Imagine: I’m a small businessman who owns a chicken shop, and a big corporation owned by the richest man in the world comes along,” he told the magazine.
This isn’t the first time a small business has tried to fight big tech companies over trademark issues.
Last October, Meta’s Threads ran into trouble with a small British software company called Threads Software Limited. Lawyers ordered Meta to stop using the Threads name in the UK because it owns the UK trademark.
The company claimed that Meta offered to purchase the “threads.app” domain four times, but declined.
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