A trademark tribunal has told Apple that it no longer has a monopoly on the prefix ‘i’, after the brand attempted to stop a small company from producing goods under the moniker DOPi.

According to a report that appeared in The Age, while the ruling won’t affect Apple’s existing trademarks it will mean that other companies will have a better chance against the brand’s battle-hardened legal team.

Michael Kirov, the registrar overseeing the case, indicated that Apple failed to demonstrate that a “person of ordinary intelligence and memory” would assume that a product that carries the letter ‘i’ would be an Apple product.

The small company, Wholesale Central, is based in New South Wales.

The announcement comes weeks after Apple expanded the description of its trademark for ‘iPhone’ to include ‘mobile device for playing video games’, ‘mobile phone and a digital audio player’ and ‘electronic data transmission equipment’.