“Apple has formally filed to trademark the name ‘iPhone’ with the US Patent and Trademark Office, documents show,” Neo reports for MacNN.
“Although the device has been on sale in the United States since last year, the company still does not technically own the trademark; this is likely due do a legal battle with Cisco, now resolved, over an existing VoIP phone which also bore the iPhone name,” Neo reports. “At present, the companies are allowing each other to share the iPhone moniker.”
Neo reports, “Apple’s new filing asserts priority based on a European application number, and comes with a figure depicting the standard iPhone logo.”
More info in the full article here.
What about the patents thats suppose to protect Apple from the imitators? Just about every manufacturer out there is copying the heck out of it right now….
It’s hard to copy multi-touch and visual voice male.
visual voice mail! Sorry. That last one was another app…
…err for the wife.
But if you notice, they haven’t copied Multitouch because they CAN’T copy Multitouch.
Remember “…and boy have we patented it!” that got a big laugh and applause at the iPhone intro. Steve was talking about how you interact with the device, not the look of the device itself. He knows they can copy the look all they want to, but they can’t copy the software and they can’t copy Multitouch.
The only question is how gullible is the public? Do they want genuine Louis Vuitton or do they want the cheap knock-off?
Peace.
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Olmecmystic
I think visual voicemail, has been copied, and didn’t Apple settle with someone over the voicebail patent, just recently?
Trademarks and patents are two different things. The article discusses a trademark on ‘iPhone’ and does not have anything to do with the 200+ patents that Apple filed for the technologies included in the iPhone device.
Hmmm then its up to us to remind some of these reviewers that when they say clone has the same touchscreen as the iPhone, its time to bring the hammer down on them. iPhone is not “touchscreen” iPhone is “MULTI-TOUCH”. Get it right or else and stop generalizing the iPhone as having a simple touchscreen!
excellent explanation by olmecmystic.
a lot of people still can’t differentiate between single-point “touch-screen” which sounds high tech for them, and “multi-touch”. so they think that other phones are in the same class as the iPhone, which is not.
some people in my country (malaysia) even went to the extent of saying that iPhone is not “touch-sensitive”. i was like “how third-world thinking!!!”. they were actually referring to the fact that you need bare fingers to touch and interact, not a stylus.
for a multi-touch device, you can’t use traditional single-point touchscreen which has cheap plastics for the screen, it won’t read properly. try observing a traditional touch-screen when you poke it with a stylus, and you’ll know what i mean.
Apple had it right when they patented the idea of using multi-touch for a phone.