Who owns iphone name

Infogear had actually registered the iPhone trademark in March Cisco's home networking division, Linksys, has been using the iPhone trademark on a new family of voice over IP phones since early last year, Cisco said. In December, Linksys expanded the iPhone family with additional products. The two companies had been in extended negotiations to settle the lawsuit, and a second extension of the talks was set to expire Wednesday.

And we said, 'No, we're planning on using it. As it turned out, Cisco and Apple in February did come to terms, settling the dispute with an agreement allowing both companies to use the name.

Many of us would perhaps be now carrying around a smartphone called the Mobi or TelePad instead , according to one former Apple exec. Not only did Cisco and Apple come to terms over the precious iPhone name, but in Apple also licensed the iOS trademark from Cisco for its iPhone software.

Cisco uses iOS to refer to its routing software. Meanwhile, it's not as if Cisco's Chandler and cohorts have exactly been twiddling their thumbs over the years. Cisco and TiVo sued each other over DVR patents back in , and Cisco as well as Google wound up paying TiVo in for a settlement over the set-up technology kerfuffle.

Cisco also aimed its legal guns at Huawei in a dispute over routing software piracy that 3Com also got into the middle of back in The device was well-reviewed and ultimately sold around , units.

Cisco then acquired InfoGear, along with the iPhone trademark. Cisco stopped releasing products named iPhone in , although it hung onto the trademark.

Apple, for its part, had been considering some version of the iPhone for a long time before debuting its first handset in In fact, Apple acquired the domain name www. If there was any other name Apple could have gone with, that ended when the iMac G3, the iBook , the iPod and the iTunes Store became back-to-back hits. But legal experts aren't so sure. And Cisco owns the trademark. That puts Apple at a severe disadvantage, weakened even further by going ahead and announcing the product without a deal in place.

Clearly 'cell phone' and 'VOIP' are different, but that doesn't mean they're not similar. For example, Delta Airlines and Delta faucets are clearly two different products, both with trademarks and can operate in the same world. But this story has a nefarious side to it as well: In Cisco's filing, the company claims that when negotiations with Apple stalled, Apple created a "front" company called Ocean Telecom Services, headquartered in Delaware, to try to secure rights to the iPhone name secretly, something first reported by AppleInsider way back in mid-October.

In fact, the website found iPhone trademark filings from Apple in Australia Oct. Taken alone, this might seem like a creative way of doing business.