By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
If you live in a country that celebrates Easter, you’ve seen them. Rank after rank after rank of sparkling golden bunnies, their gilt foil concealing the decadent Swiss chocolate underneath.
What you may not have known is that Lindt’s legendary Easter bunny confections have been involved in more than one pitched battle over copyright and intellectual property.
On Sept. 28, the Lindt bunny once again rose, bloodied but unbowed, after a buck-tooth and nail battle in Switzerland’s highest court. The Federal Court in Lausanne ruled competitor Lidl must stop selling its own gold-leaf chocolate rabbit, saying chocolate maker Lindt & Sprüngli deserves protection from copycat products.
The German discount retailer was also ordered to pull all remaining versions of its bunny-shaped chocolates off the shelves, and to destroy the remaining stock. The court did say the chocolate could be melted down and made into other confectionery products, because yum. The candy loving court ruled the destruction of the bunnies was … “proportionate, especially as it does not necessarily mean that the chocolate as such would have to be destroyed.”
Despite the product’s fame and instant recognizability, a lower court last year ruled against Lindt. It was only on appeal that the company prevailed after submitting surveys showing its gold bunny was well known to members of the general public, and that people were confused by the two products’ similar appearance, despite a number of differences between them.
The outcome is perhaps not that surprising given the Lindt bunny is a veteran of tough courtroom battles. Lindt has contested similar copyright issues in court in past years to defend its immensely popular Easter bunny, and in 2000 it applied for a trademark on the three-dimensional shape, which was granted the next year.
That trademark was tested in a previous case when rival Austrian chocolate maker Hauswirth contested the matter before the European Court of Justice, the highest court on the continent. Hauswirth also produced a gold-wrapped chocolate rabbit sporting a ribbon around its neck, but Hauswirth was first ordered by an Austrian court to stop producing them, and Germany’s federal court also ruled in 2021 that the golden color of the Lindt bunny’s foil wrapping also had trademark protection.