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Cisco Lost Rights to iPhone Trademark Last Year?
An anonymous reader writes "An investigation into the ongoing trademark dispute between Cisco and Apple over the name "iPhone" appears to show that Cisco does not own the mark as claimed in their recent lawsuit. This is based on publicly available information from the US Patent and Trademark office, as well as public reviews of Cisco products over the past year. The trademark was apparently abandoned in late 2005/early 2006 because Cisco was not using it."
iKnow that
--Steve
Cisco should just rebrand their iPhone product line and call them Apple Phones.
This guy's the limit!
Cisco on brink of losing iPhone name in Europe
I had to read TFA twice just to be sure that it was actually about the trademark in the US, not Europe.
This is definitely turning out to be a crazy situation. I agree with TFA that this is probably why Apple didn't sign the contract with Cisco after all.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Or, better yet, of Universal's lawsuits over the game "Donkey Kong" when it first came out - I saw someone mention it on /. the other day. If you're not familiar with the story, it's a pretty good read. Briefly, Universal sued on the grounds that Donkey Kong was a rip off of King Kong, and lost in part because they'd argued in another recent case that King Kong was a public domain character.
Hmmm, this reminds me of those stories that come up from time to time about some big corporation forgetting to renew their domain names. If the outcome of the trademark dispute comes down to this, it will argue strongly for paying attention to the little details.
Not at all. If TFA is right, this has nothing to do with 'little details'. The big details are that Cisco had no product called 'iPhone' for years, and recently just stuck a sticker on a picture of an existing product, rebranding it 'iPhone', when renewing the trademark, when no such branding existed in the real world.
To successfully defend a trademark, you have to show you've been consistently using it for years. Cisco couldn't do that - they had to stick a sticker on the outside of a shrink-wrap of another package. Do you not think if they actually *had* a product called the iPhone, they'd have taken a photo of that ?
Score one for the fruit company...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Laws should be applied equally to all, regardless of who it is. Politicians. Cops. Firemen. Doctors. Corporations. Blacks. Whites. etc.
The trademark laws are fair here. Sticking a label onto shrinkwrap is not a) showing use for the past 5 years CONTINUOUSLY as the law requires, b) shows any evidence this was "use" of a trademark. Use being something the public saw when purchasing the product; they didn't.
Indeed, it seems misleading, even fraudulent, what Cisco did; they pretended that this was evidence of continuous use, public use? Please. I never heard of iphone until December and I've been looking at VOIP gear off and on for the past 6 months.
Fanboys? Sure. I used to be a Mac fanboy, back in the 68k and early PPC days. No longer. I (horrible, I know) like XP more than I like MacOS, although I dislike MS more than Apple. I have no plans to buy the crippled Apple phone/iphone either, unless Cingular has some whopping cheap plans (like $60 a month for 1000+ minutes and unlimited EDGE).
Y'know, seeing as how it's an Apple product, they can rebrand the whole of their catalog (usher in the new era of Apple Inc). That way you can own aMac and aPhone and aServer with aWirelessLAN. Of course, you could also get aLife...
-BA
This is just some bloggers, not a legal opinion, even if it's from a lawyer.
Here's a demonstration that Cisco was continuously using the trademark: the support web site for the iPhone, as archived at archive.org. "With InfoGear recently being acquired by Cisco Systems, there is currently no change to your iPhone coverage. We hope you continue to enjoy using your iPhone, and we thank you for your business. So, even if Cisco wasn't selling new units, they were still supporting the old ones. That page has been archived every year since 2000, so that's a form of continuous use.
There's an active user base. The University of Florida went iPhone. There's a description of their configuration here. They have a VoIP infrastructure with three Cisco CallManagers, two Cisco 6608 VoIP gateways, a Cisco Unity voice mail system, and many Cisco IP telephones, some of which are iPhone units, on desktops. The University of Pennsylvania also went iPhone. There are probably corporate installations too, but they tend not to publish their phone instructions on the public web. Those installations have to be supported, which is something Cisco does, and gets paid for. Cisco is in the network infrastructure business, after all.
As long as there's support, and support-related revenue, the trademark is clearly in use.
Indeed, it appears less as though Cisco accidently let a valuable trademark lapse, and more like Cisco is attempting to hold onto a trademark they've never used and have no intention of using, for the sole purpose of using it as leverage against Apple. No one has any brand association with the name "iPhone" to any product other than the Apple iPhone anyway.