Associated Press:
A Chinese court says Apple has agreed to pay a local company $60 million to settle a dispute over ownership of the iPad name. The Guangdong High People’s Court said Monday that Apple and Proview Technology reached the settlement through mediation. The court said that ended the legal case.
I wonder what other forms of extortion are planned.
I wouldn’t have paid ProView a single dollar, their original IPAD was a total iMac clone and the only reason it’s called IPAD is because ProView didn’t want to stop after cloning the design, they wanted to clone the name of the iMac too.
This seems like a good example of a difference between Cook and Job’s way of operating. Jobs would have been more likely to have stuck to his principles, while Cook is more pragmatic. I’m not trying to say which I think is better … I’m sad to see Proview getting any money, but happy to have this legal unknown dealt with. China is a pretty important market for Apple.
Courtesy of the Chinese court system, Apple Inc. is now able to pay a politically expedient corporate bribe without coming under the jurisdiction of The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This is just one more reminder to Western companies doing business in China that our concepts of “rule of law” just don’t apply.
I wonder how long it will take Apple to earn that back in iPad sales, China only.
an hour. two tops.
Which is likely why Apple agreed to it. Their side of the story is out there for the court of public opinion but the legal costs to keep up the fight would have likely been as much if not more. So they put an end to it and it’s still far less than the $400-500 million that Proview was trying to go after. AND there’s no admission of any kind of guilt in the matter of Apple being ‘wrong’ for using a proxy company etc.
On the one hand I think that Proview might have led Apple to believe something that wasn’t true perhaps knowing the rumors and wanting to set this up. Which is not cool. On the other hand, even with Apple not wanting to get raped over the price they could have easily paid more than a mere $55k for the trademark. Going that low was also not all that cool. They could have easily paid more like $5 mil and it would have easily replaced by iPhone sales in a matter of a couple of weeks. 4 times that wouldn’t have been hard money for Apple to recover.