This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
The owner of a chicken shop in the north of England has lost a long-running legal dispute with Elon Musk’s Tesla.
Amanj Ali’s takeaway restaurant in Bury, Greater Manchester, called Tesla Chicken & Pizza, has been at the center of a trademark dispute with the electric vehicle company.
Last November, Ali was ordered to pay 4,000 pounds, or $5,053, to Tesla after the UK’s Intellectual Property Office finally sided with the auto giant.
Ali had registered the trademark for the takeaway in May 2022, citing inventor Nikola Tesla as inspiration for the name, the BBC reported.
When asked about the unusual inspiration, he told the outlet, “He was kind of a smart guy…in my young age, I was…reading about him, looking at pictures of him.”
While Tesla did not initially object to the trademark, Ali was informed in November 2021 that the auto company had applied for international trademark protection in the UK food and drink category, documents released by the IPO showed.
Ali opposed the request, fearing the company would try to invalidate his trademark for takeout food. Nearly a year later, Tesla did just that, arguing that Ali’s brand would take unfair advantage of the EV company’s established reputation.
Tesla representatives did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment outside of normal business hours.
After another year of arguing back and forth, Ali finally lost the case.
He told the BBC he would appeal the decision but had already spent around £8,000 in legal fees and was struggling with the stress of the dispute. Ali added that the argument with Tesla had affected his sleeping and working habits.
“Imagine, I’m just a small business owner running a chicken shop, and there’s a big company coming in owned by the richest man in the world,” he told the outlet.
This isn’t the first time small businesses have tried to clash with big tech companies over trademark issues.
In October last year, Meta’s Threads ran into problems with a small British software company called Threads Software Limited. Its lawyers told Meta to stop using the Threads name in the UK as it owned the British trademark.
The company said Meta made four offers to buy the “threads.app” domain, which it rejected.