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Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

If you buy phones with cracked screens, you have a supply of iPhone flex cables. Apple does not own those flex cables, but them putting their holy sigil[0] on the cables lets them pretend that they do to cash-strapped government agencies that are willing to accept bribes from Apple.

Furthermore, the parts were seized on trademark grounds; the program in question only deals with trademark. There are different processes for dealing with stolen goods (as opposed to counterfeit ones) but those would require Apple to provide proof. CBP's trademark program lets you just say "we own this mark, here's a lot of money, we'll tell you what to seize".

[0] Apple is a religion. Tim Cook is the iPhone pope. Nobody can tell me otherwise.

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I think you mean iPope

> cash-strapped government agencies that are willing to accept bribes from Apple

It's $190 to register a copyright and is open to any copyright holder.

And it makes sense to enforce this at the border rather than allowing counterfeit products into the market.

Flagged. This is about trademarks.

From the article:

> Apple participates in CBP’s e-Recordation Program, a “service for trademark owners” where American rightsholders proactively re-register their US registered trademarks with CBP and pay regular fees to ensure special, stricter enforcement on the particular trademarks they request.

The fee for e-Recordation is $190 per International Class of Goods (IC) i.e. trademarks and copyright.

https://www.cbp.gov/trade/priority-issues/ipr/protection

First off, this is trademark, copyright. Second, merely registering a trademark doesn't get you this level of treatment from CBP; Apple pays them significantly more money in order to be able to tell them how they want their trademark enforced at the border. Third, when your shit gets seized by CBP, that's based purely on the allegations of Apple; there's no due process (like there would be with, say, an ITC patent action).

Keep in mind here: the products in question are not counterfeit. If Apple had to sue to get the parts taken out of the market, they would lose, because of very obvious exceptions to trademark law - e.g. official Apple flex cables don't stop being official Apple flex cables when you plug a third-party iPhone screen into them. That would be like, if I sold you a Samsung TV, but I had an Apple HDMI cable hanging off the back of it, and then Apple sued me saying that I was selling a counterfeit Apple TV because the HDMI cable had an Apple logo on it.

> Apple pays them significantly more money in order to be able to tell them how they want their trademark enforced at the border

Do you have a source for this.

Because in the article it does not mention Apple paying any extra money to CBP and there is no information on the CBP website about it.

The source is the article we're discussing.

From the article:

pretty sure Apple is paying more than $80 to the CBP

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