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Apple To Pay $60 Million Over iPad Trademark Dispute
tekgoblin writes "Today a Chinese court has stated Apple, Inc. has agreed to pay a Chinese company $60 Million dollars to settle their infamous iPad name dispute. In 2006 Apple purchased the Taiwanese rights to the name 'iPad' from the company Proview Electronics. In China however, the trademarked name was still owned by Proview Technologies, a Shenzhen based subsidiary of Proview Electronics. Since 2011, Proview Technologies has battled Apple in the Xicheng district court and in 2012 the Santa Clara Superior Court. Both cases are still ongoing."
US companies are forbidden by law to pay bribes so they have to go about it a round about way.
This is just the price of doing business in China.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
For the couple minutes it takes them to make it back.
Especially against the Chinese. I mean, they're paramount for proper trademark usage!
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In 2006 Apple purchased the Taiwanese rights to the name 'iPad' from the company Proview Electronics. In China however, the trademarked name was still owned by Proview Technologies, a Shenzhen based subsidiary of Proview Electronics.
According to Proview's creditors. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary.
I'm betting the flood of Apple investment in Chinese factories during these proceedings was the larger part of the deal with the Chinese government to allow Apple to use the trademark. The 60 million is more for show so Apple can be painted as being in the wrong instead of being shook down. In the end, Apple will continue to make billions and the Chinese government will get a cut.
Actually... Apple paid for the name in good faith.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
IANAL, but the structure of many multi-national corporations are weird and complicated. The easiest way I've found to think about it is to treat multi-nationals as a big family with a super-patriarch/matriarch instead of thinking of a multi-national as a single person.
For example, generally, in each country a multi-national generally sets up it's own division of the company which is chartered to do business in that location, which is usually structured as a mostly owned subsidiary of the parent company. The reason to do this is to satisfy the laws of that host country w/o imposing them on the parent company (e.g., ownership requirements, employment requirements, tax requirements, etc).
Of course once you set up a bunch of these companies in different juristictions, now you can play all sorts of games. The biggest game that is played is the income tax shell game (moving income into companies that have the lowest tax rate). The other big game is to hid parent company liability for big disasters and legal lawsuits (parent company was just an investor in the local company).
In China, they often require a certain percentage of chinese ownership or key employees for certain types of companies, and it's likely that this is why taiwanese Proview set up this china subsidiary in the first place. It's not inconcievable that the trademark on iPad needed to be registered in china and they chose to have the local company do that registration instead of the parent company in taiwan for legal reasons (they might not recognize the taiwan trademark law in china). Of course, it retrospect, that seemed like a brilliant decision, but I'm guessing they just did it by accident.
Chinese leadership wealth makes Romney look "middle class" in comparison.
Seems like it's "One China, except when two Chinas can charge you twice"
My understanding is that this only affects the sale of iPads in China, so I'd imagine they'd tack on an extra fee only for Chinese iPad customers. Even if all iPads had a price increase, since Apple is selling almost 60M of them a year (http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=b738b448-5097-44bd-9bdb-48b8d7c8b083) that'd mean just about $1/unit to recoup all costs within a year. So about the price of a single app, or less than the price of gas to drive up to the Apple store.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
I love how a disparaging play on a company's name gives your point so much more added weight.
Does it work the same if I say I don't buy Motorhole-a or SameSong phones? How about referring to the Galaxy NextCopy?
No, I sound like an idiot. My arguments lose weight due to communication noise, and using such non-sequiturs actually makes me a bit dumber each time I use one. Given the frequency that I hear that on Slashdot these days (the intellectual equivalent of "Your mom's a poo poo head!"), that explains a lot.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
I know a hot topic gets multiple selections, so do Slashdot editors pick the one with the single worst article? This news items is covered in several reputable places, yet, they selected a submission that looks like it was written by an 8th grader. They use AP's Tweet to make it look like an official AP story/headline. There's brilliantly nonsensical lines like "Proview is continuing their lawsuit in Santa Clara for $1.5 billion dollars while allging fraud and unfair competition. The case was soon after thrown out by a judge."
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Except... that's not what happened.
They bought what they thought were the world-wide rights to the trademark. What Apple did that you really should be bitching about is they created a dummy corp and lied to Proview about what the trademark was for. "Oh well we're just a piddly lil company that needs that acronymn, it's hardly worth anything but if you'd like to part with it..."
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)