Cisco Sues Apple Over iPhone Trademark

lucabrasi999 writes "It appears that Apple may be running out of items that they can prefix with the letter "i". Cisco is suing Apple over trademark infringement. Cisco claims to own the rights to the "iPhone" trademark since they purchased Infogear in 2000. Infogear filed for the rights to the trademark in 1996."

Comments

Re:what about these guys?

[powerlord]

Actually, there was a whole dot-com phenomena of putting "i" in front of things too.

Yes ... which is where we got the iMac, iPod and iTunes. I wonder if Apple can make the case that people already associate the "i*" with THEM, either the 'iPhones' TradeMark should be considered diluted, or it should be assigned to them.

Re:Trademark info

[daviddennis]

It does seem a little suspicious, since if Apple was begging for the trademark "for years", Linksys had to be very aware of this fact.

I think Linksys introduced their iPhone to counteract an expected argument that the trademark was not in use. As I remember, it was a hasty rebranding of an already existing product line. It would be hard to argue that the name was well-established commercially.

I can't help but notice that the Apple iPhone itself has no visible marks on it, other than the Apple logo on the back. They could change the name from iPhone to jPhone or kPhone in seconds flat.

One thing for sure: The value of Linksys' trademark is virtually zero today. Whenever anyone says "iphone", Apple will be the reason why. And the beauty of that rather curious argument is that the public did it by so relentlessly using the name before launch. Apple itself didn't do a thing to destroy the trademark before launch day.

Apple may rename the product, if Linksys is asking for too much, but I'll bet that years from now people will still be talking about iPhone, even as they use their pMacs or MacPhones.

Trademarks are funny that way.

Finally, will this curious little squabble have any impact? I'm curious since I don't think the amount of money this dispute could yield would be worth the executive time it takes and the odd publicity brought to both companies.

Unless the publicity was the idea? It seems like this has single-handedly given the Linksys iPhone product a blaze of the kind of publicity you simply can't buy.

I do wonder now if this was a setup by Linksys and they didn't intend to give up the trademark without a loud and public fight, not for the money but so that someone, somewhere in the world would hear about their product and maybe buy a couple of them. It's not a bad strategy, especially since they seem like the underdogs ...

I mean, this case sounds like an example of the stubbornness of Steve, but what if it's an elaborate publicity stunt? Smart one, too.

I wonder how much publicity Tiger Direct got out of the bizarre Tiger vs Apple suit?

You see, I really wouldn't think Steve would make a dumb decision like not have the rights nailed down tight before MacWorld ... it just seems out of character, particularly with a device for which there are so many good names.

D