Apple to lose iPhone trademark in Brazil: source | Hacker News Reader

Apple to lose iPhone trademark in Brazil: source

reuters.com

It's ridiculous, they have a campaign to explain their iPhone is not the iPhone. They even highlight how their product is worse than Apple's (saying things like, "the Apple iPhone is faster, has more resolution"):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkRf6Gv4NtU

They probably made the campaign so no one can sue them for false marketing later, though they will surely sell units to uneducated parents thinking they got a really good deal on an iPhone for 1/3 of the price.

How is it ridiculous? They registered first, they say that their iphone is clearly not an Apple iPhone, they show the differences, so what's ridiculous about it? Seems pretty clear that it was their trademark first.

I know you're brazilian too but they did the right think by releasing that video. They clearly spent a few bucks on it and I'm sure they did it for their own good but you can't ignore the fact that they didn't tried to ride on Apple's profit wave and screw up customers at the same time. Most companies wouldn't.

This makes me happy.

Did you know at least one other corporation had a trademark for the name iPhone before Apple announced their choice of product name in 2007?

Considering what patent trolls Apple is, and considering Brazil is a sizable market for smartphones and computer equipment, this is a tiny bit of karma, as far as I'm concerned.

BTW, Xerox has yet to see money for inventing the OS GUI and the modern mouse.

Your comment was fine without the Xerox bullshit - they agreed to let Apple take a peek at their inventions in exchange for a $1m investment. Apple later bought the rights to the Xerox Alto GUI.

Do you mean the infogear/linksys/cisco iphone? The one that was discontinued in 2001?

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1127

A mark shall be deemed to be “abandoned” if either of the following occurs:

(1) When its use has been discontinued with intent not to resume such use. Intent not to resume may be inferred from circumstances. Nonuse for 3 consecutive years shall be prima facie evidence of abandonment. “Use” of a mark means the bona fide use of such mark made in the ordinary course of trade, and not made merely to reserve a right in a mark.

Strange that a trademark should only last 3 years of non-active use when copyright is lifetime + 70 years. I guess there's IP and there's IP.

How many individual developers has Apple picked on for patent infringement? None that I can think of.

How many patent trolls has Apple stepped in to defend their customers from? Lodsys backed off from attacking App Store developers when Apple said they'd sign on as a co-defendant in any case.

How many patent trolls has Nathan Myhrvold created through Intellectual Ventures? Literally thousands.

Apple's embroiled in a patent war. Don't confuse that with being patent trolls.

You also forget that Xerox remained uninterested in producing a consumer computer incorporating the concepts they pioneered. Likewise, HP, when Steve Wozniak was working there, declined to produce a personal computer he designed.

"The late Apple chief executive Steve Jobs famously decreed he would go "thermonuclear" to stop Google's Android from allegedly ripping off Apple's products, conveniently forgetting the many instances of Apple "borrowing" from others' IP at Xerox PARC and elsewhere."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/patent_trolls/

Translation goes around these lines: On the year 2000 (Apple's iPhone only came in 2007), our marketing department needed a name for our "internet phone", the name was too big so we decided to use "iphone" instead. We filled the patent register in the same year and in 2008 the INPI gave us full patent rights.

Now they proceed to explain how Gradiente's Iphone is a piece of garbage, they could have added that Apple's iPhone on Brazil costs 2 or 3 times more than on other countries, but they didn't.

I think that this decision can stop Apple from sell iphones here in Brazil. We pay an huge amount of money for apple products because of government taxes (an iPhone 5 costs the equivalent of U$1.300) and I don't think Apple sells a lot of iphones here to compensate buy the trademark. Sometimes it's cheaper to take a plane and buy it in another country. I understand that Gradiente has the right to fight for the name, after all they registered it first. But they don't have an real competidor and are just use the name to fight with Apple for money (patent troll?). That's wrong and everybody loses.

I wonder if they will sell it to Apple now that it has been established that the IP belongs to someone else.

I don't think the question is so much whether this is wrong / right, but how does Apple proceed from here?

What kind of price could be negotiated?

Will Gradiente take it, or is the confusion worth more?

My understanding is that Gradiente only released their phone to prop up the ip claim who's registration was running out. The whole point for them has always been to get a fat check from Apple and it looks like they will. Apple is no stranger to writing checks for their tendency to run roughshod over other people's IP. That's not exactly what happened here but, like with the ipad in China mark, I imagine they'll end up writing a hefty 8 digit check for the iphone in Brazil rights.

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