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Apple and Other Tech Companies Have Registered Their IP in Jamaica, Tonga, and Elsewhere For Years (qz.com)
Apple's product launches are notoriously secretive, but the Cupertino, California tech giant is sure to do one thing ahead of a big reveal: file trademark paperwork in Jamaica. From a Quartz report: It did this for Siri, the Apple Watch, macOS, and dozens of its major products months before the equivalent paperwork was lodged in the United States. Likewise, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft routinely file trademarks for their most important products in locales far flung from Silicon Valley and Seattle. These include Jamaica, Tonga, Iceland, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago -- places where trademark authorities don't maintain easily searchable databases. The tech giants are exploiting a US trademark-law provision that lets them effectively claim a trademark in secret. Under this provision, once a mark is lodged with an intellectual property office outside the US, the firm has six months to file it with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). When the firm does file in the US, it can point to its original application made abroad to show that it has a priority claim on the mark.
If companies want to keep their product secret until a big announcement, I don't have a problem with that.
If this is the legal trick they use to accomplish that, then again, there is no problem.
As long as they aren't using it to push around little people, or extort others, then it's an interesting trick, but nothing to get worried about.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If it was meant to inspire outrage it failed. this is just nonsense news. It is mildly interesting and if it had been portrayed in a "FYI This is a clever trick some big companies are using that hurts no one, if anything it creates a small amount of jobs in some poor countries, without taking anything away from the USA" it would have been a quality article