Quartz:
Apple no longer exclusively owns the iPhone name in China. The California tech giant recently lost a trademark suit against a Chinese company, which now holds the right to make and sell handbags and other leather products branded “IPHONE.”
The Beijing Municipal High People’s Court rejected Apple’s appeal of the trademark dispute against Xintong Tiandi Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. on Mar. 31, state media Legal Daily reported (link in Chinese). The final judgement allows the Beijing company to brand leather products including handbags, purses, and cellphone and passport cases with the name “IPHONE.”
A surprising development after all these years.
So what? If this kind of thing ever becomes a significant problem, Apple can simply rebrand its phones “Apple Phone”.
Let’s all bank on the Chinese to grow our economy.
“China” the new middle class…
The Chinese cannot be trusted to have our best interest at heart.
Were you ever so naive that you trusted they DID? This is the country from which we have term kow-tow. They have never lost that mentality.
I just like stating the painfully obvious, that’s all.
Doesn’t China already have some very loose “copyright protection” as it is? This doesn’t seem like it is really that big of a story from the country where you can buy knock-off phones on any corner.
Well okay, then 😉
Apple’s management is somewhat incompetent. They seem all too naïve.
In the US they don’t lobby as much as they should (Google spends millions on official lobbying to the tune of $20 Millions per year, besides all the other services that they provide to politicians. Amazon spends similar amounts). Apple’s management seems to think that just because they are in the right, that they’ll be vindicated in the end. They don’t seem know how to work the political machine that controls their markets and severely affects their fortunes.
Here, they probably needed to bribe somebody to get their way, which is what that chinese company probably did.
In the iBooks case, they were the new entrant competing against an entrenched monopoly (Amazon) and they got their asses handed to them even when everybody knew that they were in the right.
And now in india, a poor country with poor population, they can’t even sell refurbished phones, in the country where everybody knows that greasing few palms gets you whatever you want.
Apple really does behave like a bunch of geeks who are clueless about the real world and who have no money whatsoever to feed political machines.