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Apple Loses Exclusive Rights To 'iPhone' Trademark For Non-Smartphone Products In China (appleinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from AppleInsider: Adding to the company's problems in the region, Apple has lost exclusivity on the use of the "iPhone" trademark in China, and must now share it with Beijing-based leather products maker Xintong Tiandi Technology, reports said on Tuesday. On March 31, the Beijing Municipal High People's Court rejected an Apple appeal of an earlier ruling, according to Quartz. Xintong Tiandi is already selling a number of "IPHONE" products, including purses, passport cases, and most notably phone cases. The company registered its trademark in China in 2007, the same year as the Apple iPhone launched in the United States. That was, however, still five years after Apple registered the iPhone name in China for computer products, something which formed the basis of a 2012 complaint to the country's trademark authorities. In 2013 the government ruled that because Apple couldn't prove the name "IPHONE" was well-known prior to Xintong Tiandi's registration, the public wouldn't link its use in a way that would harm Apple interests. In rejecting Apple's appeal, the High People's Court further noted that the company didn't sell the iPhone in mainland China until 2009. This comes after Apple reported its first earnings decline in more than a decade.
They have such a phony name...
Then we would see how well those "iPhone" cases and purses will sell.
I really don't give a fuck about Apple as I don't use any of their products but, um, this is some real fucking bullshit. Keep it classy, China.
No it didn't. I would recon to say you have never lived in Japan either.
Get out your aniti-Japanese Chinese communist.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/usa.asp
Apple, the embattled computer manufacturer, is on borrowed time. I'll give them four years, max, before they're purchased by an East Texas IP troll.
wrong.... http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/usa.asp
Let's stay on topic!
when you are, more or less, a marketing company that manage brands, and through media hype can command a premium price for your branded products, over similar products with same quality and features, then, when lose your name, you end up empty.
No it didn't. This is a stupid internet legend with no basis in fact.
They didn't have Snopes back then obviously: http://www.snopes.com/business...
China is correctly protecting itself from all levels of outsourceing, hell they saw what walmart did to the US ecomony. The iphone copyright is just them having fun, maybe someone just won a bet.
Snopes, you say. That must've been some mind-bending research.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
you don't do business with or in China. If you think Apple is the only one who will get this treatment, dream on.
China, as we know, has little concept of rights whether human or otherwise. I once read that in China if you get taken advantage of it's your fault, not the person stealing or whatever from you.
Don't buy products made in China. It's the single most effective means to give them the middle finger.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Those of us on internet in late 90's remember the most popular voice chat software that even worked over dialup. It was hugely popular among ham radio operators as being one of them, we got the ok to setup links to 2 meter and 70cm band repeaters, after not the greatest of verification but it wasn't a disaster.
1995 article on the original iphone: http://www.wired.com/1995/10/i...
it worked damn good over dialup for what it was, even allowed calls to landlines, and ham radio links, it was great for those days, and of course peer 2 peer
1996 college paper on the specifics of Iphone: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~kell...
China takes it a bit far to the side of rejecting patents, but to be fair its a good balance to the crazy lengths some western countries go allowing obvious & all encompassing patents. There's a lot to be said about not letting a bunch of lawyers siphon off $29 Billion from the economy per year (US alone). Patents are intended, at least in the US, to be for the benefit of society not the endless gratification of an individual/company.
LOL, funny to hear Apple made the same blunder so many companies do when they name a product.
Usa Japan has existed with that name since at least the 8th century and is not and has not ever been a manufacturing city.
Apple should start selling Xintong brand anal leakage plugs and Tiandi penis perforators. I doubt that company has trademarked their name for those products in china.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Cisco made a device called an iphone long before Apple made theirs. Apple has no right to an exclusive trademark.
In fact, I'm pretty sure this "internet" thing is also an urban legend.
Also, the country of origin must be listed, not the city or location of manufacture. So Usa (as a town) would be illegal to list as the only identifier of manufactured location.
Learn to love Alaska
iPhone
iPad
iOS
iMac
iMovie
iSight
iTunes
iLife
iWork
Can't the marketers be more imaginative FFS !
China smiles to you and you sit down at the negotiations:
China: "Here's our proposed deal. You'll give us everything that we want, and in return you'll get nothing and we won't even say thank you. I think you'll see that this is completely fair and equitable."
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
.
Them are the rules.
So not only do you not realize your "usa" thing was wrong, you completely misunderstand your own link. Good going.
This has been known forever, though Apple probably just wanted to make their point although they knew they ultimately could not win.
In a legal battle between a Chinese entity and a foreign entity, Chinese courts always rule on the side of the Chinese entity. Always. Even if they have to come up with the most convoluted legal logic possible to do so. This is one of the warnings we used to give clients when they were considering joint ventures with Chinese companies. "Do you trust them?" (The answer was inevitably "no".) "Can you survive when -- not if -- they screw you over? Because you'll have no recourse when it happens." The only hope of ever seeing legal ramifications is if a company can get another Chinese JV to do the suing.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Seems like I've heard that name before in leather products and electronics.
Apple bought the iPhone trademark from Cisco, whom used it for a VoIP Phone years before.
China is a criminal haven, starting with the criminal murderer Xi and moving down through the military. We funded this Commie Mafia with outsourcing.
It sounded to me like the court said that there is very little chance that this purse manufacturer's use of the trademark iPhone would harm Apple's mobile phone sales in any way. Rulings like this are pretty common in cases where two companys in radically different lines of business like, say, a agricultural machinery manufacturer and a computer manufacturer, are using the same trademark.
A claim of trademark infringement requires the registration and the allegedly infringing activity to be closely related fields of use. But a claim of dilution of a famous trademark, in those jurisdictions that recognize it, has no field of use restriction. Good luck selling a "Coca-Cola" brand television, even without the Spencerian logo.
It's not a SEMANTIC use, it's a GRAPHICAL use. Apple uses iPhone. The Chinese are using IPHONE. In English, we think that these are related, because we have a concept of upper and lower case letters. However, if you think of the graphical nature of Chinese writing, or of something utilitarian like circuit board traces, it becomes obvious that these two collections of shapes are TOTALLY different. If you had both of these on your keyring, the IPHONE probably wouldn't even go into the lock for the iPhone. If your circuit board had parts in the same places, but the traces underneath were that different, you might well be shorting power to ground.
Chinese see Western copyright and Patents as signs of imperialism. They also see on problem in stealing most of the technology or copying it.
If it wasn't for the greedy bankers in the West , China would still be a poor repressive communist state.
China is such a cesspool, that the Chinese will lie, cheat and do whatever to come to the US.
I can imagine the opposite, but why would a manufacturer want to claim a product made in Japan to be manufactured in the USA?
Actually, it is something I remember "learning" as a kid in the '70s.
It was one of those interested "facts" I picked up somewhere along the way and more or less forgot about until I saw this thread. Of course it's ridiculous to imagine that they could get away with such a violation of not only the spirit but surely the letter of laws requiring country of origin but with no real way of checking I accepted many such legends as fact.
It's just that such "facts" are now also spread on the internet despite the internet also providing an easy way to debunk them.
Of course, the internet can also muddy issues terribly with competing and contradicting opinions and junk science.
It has made me much more skeptical or perhaps that has come with age and experience. It's also interesting to catch myself falling into the trap of accepting as at least "probably true" (if not "fact") things I read on the internet which are well-written and contain quite a bit of truth (that I have good reason to believe is true). It happened a few hours ago. I thought I learned something, but then realizing it was easy enough to confirm giving that it was about a 19th century US President I quickly actually did learn something. In fact, it was built on a small grain of truth but one that had been digested by a bull and hidden inside a huge pile of bullshit. It wasn't even a very sensational or hard-to-believe "fact" and was something that could be said of a lot of Americans in the 19th century, but just not this particular president.
I actually think there's a high probability that the person who wrote it truly believed what he wrote though. Maybe not, but history does still get spread through word of mouth (as well as online) and people tend to believe things from certain sources or for trivial reasons like "Well, that's what I always heard" or "My teacher (or a parent) told me that" so it must be true. Then they repeat that to others and misinformation spreads until someone knows better or bothers to confirm it.
benefiting from American protectionism crying after they end up on the receiving end of some protectionism themselves. Funny.
And you want to protect a foreign brand??!!! Chinese have 400 name particles they combine in groups of three. For their population size, this gives us about a million people per each combination! Considering some names are forbidden because onomatopeically they point at some body configurations, they must be hitting names at a bigger rate than possible with their 400 particles. So when someone refers to Chinese people with a SINGLE SYLLABLE NAME PARTICLE, the confusion is SO BIG you can have huge populations of Chinese being referred to and feeling invited to come emigrate and live with US! Do you _think_ they will respect ONE name so that ONE entity uses it exclusively? I bet they cannot even if they want to! And since their labguage is pictographic, the same will be true for graphical signs! Little known fact: if you break an LCS screen over some text and it still displays, you will get cryptographic scriptures good enough to be **interpreted** and made sense of Chinese readers! Which makes me wonder how many times we ve developed screens and Chinese have destroyoed them...