What’s in a name?

February 1, 2010 by sanjay

Calling their device the iPad was an interesting choice for Apple considering that the Trademark is disputed by not one, but by two other parties and there is a high likelihood that they will not be issued the trademark.

The situation as it stands, then, is that Mag-Tek is selling the IPAD under a valid trademark, Fujitsu is selling its iPad with a pending trademark application and Apple has announced (and plans to sell) its own iPad with no trademark at all.

From a more extensive summary to be found here: http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/gadge…demark-dispute

Apple has to convince the USPTO that iPad is similar to its iPod franchise and that its use of the name iPad will not confuse Mag-Tek’s keypad customers. This is if it can first convince them that Fujitsu is not the rightful owner despite having a pending trademark application on and off since 2003.

Read the original thread on Pad Computer Forum!

Comments

jschneier

Administrator

This seems par for the course with Apple. As far as I understand most products they have released to-date have had trademark issues with their name. For example, with iPhone there was the Cisco debacle and iPod was owned by some guy making public computer terminals.

It seems like most of the time they have won...except in the case of the Mighty Mouse which they renamed to Magic Mouse...

So unfortunately I think we may be stuck with iPad despite the trademark issues that are going to crop up. (I kind of wish they had gone with iTab)

02-02-2010, 09:54 AM jschneier is offline

GMoney Moderator	It looks like Apple settled this pretty easily by opening up its wallets. They just bought the trademark from Fujitsu. http://patentauthority.com/2010/03/a...-from-fujitsu/
03-26-2010, 02:45 PM	#3

shaycorl Junior Member	That is true Apple is a brand in recent years more and more peoples are switching to Apple and to be more specific from windows to mac OS. Then apple i phone was a totally revolutionary device which ruled the whole world. Let's just see how i Pad goes. **** Last edited by shaycorl; 04-14-2010 at 11:12 AM..
04-03-2010, 02:23 PM	#4