January 11th, 2007
Cisco blogs about the iPhone suit
Mark Chandler, Cisco's SVP and General Counsel, has posted a blog entry on Apple's infringement of their iPhone trademark claiming that "this is not a suit against Apple’s innovation, their modern design, or their cool phone. It is not a suit about money or royalties. This is a suit about trademark infringement."
Yesterday, Cisco issued a press release on this issue stating:
Cisco® today announced that it has filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Apple, Inc., seeking to prevent Apple from infringing upon and deliberately copying and using Cisco's registered iPhone trademark.
The blog is a little more casual than the stuffy, corporate speak in the press release (as blogs should be) and they actually come off sounding like compassionate human beings:
At MacWorld (sic), Apple discussed the patents pending on their new phone technology. They clearly seem to value intellectual property. If the tables were turned, do you think Apple would allow someone to blatantly infringe on their rights? How would Apple react if someone launched a product called iPod but claimed it was ok to use the name because it used a different video format? Would that be ok? We know the answer – Apple is a very aggressive enforcer of their trademark rights. And that needs to be a two-way street.
I want to hear Apple's side of the story on this but they're being incredibly quiet. Apple needs to fire up the blogs.apple.com subdomain now and start blogging about such things. I mean, if big companies like Microsoft and Cisco blog, why doesn't Apple?
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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