Why Jamaica is the first to know about Apple’s new products before the rest of the world

“Apple’s product launches are notoriously secretive, but the Cupertino, California tech giant is sure to do one thing ahead of a big reveal: file trademark paperwork in Jamaica,” Joon Ian Wong and Christopher Groskopf report for Quartz.

“It did this for Siri, the Apple Watch, macOS, and dozens of its major products months before the equivalent paperwork was lodged in the United States,” Wong and Groskopf report. “Likewise, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft routinely file trademarks for their most important products in locales far flung from Silicon Valley and Seattle. These include Jamaica, Tonga, Iceland, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago — places where trademark authorities don’t maintain easily searchable databases.”

“The tech giants are exploiting a US trademark-law provision that lets them effectively claim a trademark in secret,” Wong and Groskopf report. “The filings made overseas aren’t, of course, actually secret — they’re just not easy to access if you can’t go in person. For instance, the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office allows visitors to search filings in person at its office in Kingston. People can also ask the office to search filings for them, but a Jamaican address is required to receive the results, and the process takes three weeks. ”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: It’s expensive, but well worth it for Apple to maintain secrecy, especially with the plethora of slavish Apple imitators the world over.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]