security-awareness-training.com

Apple is being sued by Cisco over the trademark “iPhone”. Cisco owns the registered trademark ‘iPhone’ and uses it for a VOIP phone marketed under their Linksys brand. 

For anyone who’s watched Apple over the last couple of years, it’s no great surprise. They’ve been involved in a long running on-and-off dispute with Apple Corp (the Beatles’ recording company). But the fact that they’ve walked headlong into this just has me scratching my head.

A quick search of the US Patent and Trademark Office database shows a number of companies who’ve registered “iPhone” as a trademark in the USA for various purposes, and Apple isn’t one of them. According to the news report on eWeek:

A search of trademark and patent office Web sites revealed that Apple already has the iPhone trademarked in the United Kingdom, Singapore and Australia, while other filings are pending in Canada, the European Union, New Zealand and Hong Kong.

It’s also interesting that Apple chose to call their TV offering “Apple TV” instead of iTV (as earlier rumored). Clearly they’re aware of trademark law.

There are undeniably problems with some areas of intellectual property law. For example, there are problems with patent law (or, more accurately, the poor application of patent law) resulting in ridiculously broad patent claims. And copyright law is complicated enough to make your head spin once you start looking into its intricacies. But trademark law has always seemed (to me) to be fairly straightforward - if it’s going to confuse a typical consumer, it’s going to be an infringement.

This is one that should have been obvious from the day that they started putting together the marketing plan. Altogether, it sounds like another must-win for the lawyers!